A civil and productive conversation on the hot topic of ethnicity in the United

States. WFB: "Ms. Chavez, in your judgment does the vision--or, if you prefer, the

fantasy--of the WASP still affect ethnic thought in America in the sense of its being an

archetype?" LC: "What troubles me ... is that somehow we seem to be talking about

bloodlines here. ... In fact, in the United States what is most remarkable is that these ethnic divisions disappear over time, and it is now more common for Eastern and

Southern Europeans to marry outside of their group ... And I think that is increasingly

becoming true of Hispanics, and we even see some increase in intermarriage rates

between blacks and whites." ... KB: "[WASPs], because they happened to get here

first, put a character type in place, and then what happens after that is assimilation ... A

lot of the . .. problems we have come from an abandonment of these WASP principles of

living, and the main villains in that were WASPs themselves."