A blast from the past.

A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style

Susanna Salk

So I was in high school when I made my first foray into (I guess what you would call) WASP style. It was 1996, I was young and stupid, and I spent some birthday money on a pink ribbon belt from LL Bean printed with little green whales. I wore it proudly to school the next day, and my best friend looked askance at it. "Are those fucking whales?" she asked me. When I said yes, she looked at me askance (this was the height of grunge, remember) and said, "Well, isn't that preppy of you."

The whale belt was only the first step. Lots of beautiful things followed: Lilly Pullitzer shift dresses and Jack Rogers sandals and Ralph Lauren polos, grosgrain flipflops, nautical themed everything and pearls pearls pearls. I have the preppy-look down pat. But there are reasons why I can never fully be an actual WASP. To wit:

• I don't think I make enough money
  
• While I am White, I am not completely Anglo-Saxon, and was raised Catholic.
• Because I am not fully Anglo-Saxon, my skin tone is completely wrong for pastels.
• Also, I am not blonde
• And I would never wear whales that close to my ass nowadays

Still, this did not prevent me, at age 14, from getting my hands on an old copy of The Preppy Handbook and reading it cover to cover. It was a good ten years before I realized that book was supposed to be ironic. But it seems like I am in good company, because Susanna Salk, author of A Privileged Life, doesn't seem to realize that, either.

The glossy pictures in this book--divided neatly into subsections of "Icons," "Lifestyle," "Ivy League," "Fashion," and "Homes"--are interspersed with Salk's own childhood memories from growing up lily-white and rich as shit, witty captions, and quotes from WASPs on WASPs, including several pulled directly from The Preppy Handbook and reprinted with a complete, and SHOCKING lack of irony. If Salk knows that the authors of the PH were poking fun at her demographic, there's little to no indication. In fact, she seems to revel in the things that, despite my childhood horseback riding, tennis, and dancing lessons, make me most glad of all I am not a WASP. The love of shitty food. The alcoholism. The snobby exclusivity. The ugly home decor.

And then there's the fact that the W in WASP, which stands for WHITE. The fact that this celebrated group is defined by the color of the skin of its members (and by the color of the skin of the people who aren't allowed to join) is problematic for me. It would be maybe different if the term wasn't coined in 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. But the fact that it was denotes to me that while the rest of the world was desegregating, a select group of wealthy whites was drawing closer and closer together, to the exclusion of disadvantaged blacks.

Salk talks about, with regards to fashion, how younger WASPs are embracing new stores, new colors, new looks. I think it would have made a stronger book for Salk to at least cursorily discuss the ways in which the WASP culture has expanded and evolved over the years with regards to race, too. Because, whether they like it or not, the WASP lifestyle has been embraced by many wealthy minorities. Colson Whitehead writes about them in his book, Sag Harbor. Our African-American president went to two Ivy League schools, and his African-American wife owns stock in J.Crew, for crying out loud! I'm just saying: they do exist, but you'd never know it from Salk's book. There's not one brown face in this sea of white (save for a few appalling tans), or even an acknowledgment that the movement is exclusionary by definition. There's no indication that we're living in the 21st century at all. Maybe even the latter half of the 20th.

It's fine to glorify your roots. But if you're going to celebrate something, why not celebrate the fact that you've overcome past prejudices and exclusions, too? If you don't, the only thing to be assumed is that you haven't overcome them. They're still there.

Dang if the pictures aren't pretty, though.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars