>The point of the women's story is that the bank makes the racist assumption that all blacks are poor.

I understand... and my point was that the bank may NOT be making that assumption but may be making a business decision based on others' assumptions. In fact, the bank is in a position to know full well the financial state of the lawyer, but also is under the obligation to maintain the value of its property. Of course, the "bank" may, in reality, be a nest of racists.

And speaking of WASPs, I think Mr. Cook may have been indulging in a bit of revisionist history. WASP was coined in 1957 or thereabouts. Here is something from Richard Brookhiser regarding its history:

There was a book called The Protestant Establishment by a man named E. Digby Baltzell. He's still alive. He's a professor emeritus of sociology at Penn, and I actually interviewed him for this book. I said, "Why did you make up the acronym? Why did you turn White Anglo Saxon Protestant into WASP?" He said, "Well, White Anglo Saxon Protestant wouldn't fit on a chart. Too big to fit on a chart." I think he was pulling my leg because the fact is if the acronym had spelled out crickets or ants or some insect that people kind of like, it wouldn't have caught on. The fact that it spelled out an insect that stings, that doesn't make honey, that's mean-tempered, that's unpredictable, that's why people grabbed it, because it was a hostile term.

http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/