privilege Quotes

“I could be all the way across the country in California and I’d still be white, cops and everyone else would still see me as just a ‘regular kid,’ an ‘All-American’ boy. ‘Regular.’ ‘All American.’ White.”

“I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds.”

“Those friends who knew, laughed to scorn the idea that Marguerite St. Just had married a fool for the sake of the worldly advantages with which he might endow her. They knew, as a matter of fact, that Marguerite St. Just cared nothing about money, and still less about a title.”

“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody,” she said. “But it’s customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”

“People in America get up and go to their nine-to-five jobs every day and are oblivious to all these battles and wars and people dying every minute all over the world. This is life. This is how other countries live. This is a daily occurrence in some places.”

“God gave him enough, and yet he wants all. Such are the pale-faces.”

“When I look back, I realize she raised me like a white kid—not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.”

“I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white.”

″‘Aiyah, Nadine, there’s a difference between being grand and being discreet,’ Daisy commented, knowing full well that families like the Leongs and the Youngs guarded their privacy to the point of obsession.”

“I don’t care if your dad is the Sultan of Brunei. You happened to be born into a privileged family. What you do with that truth is completely up to you. I’m here because I want to be with you. But if I didn’t, all the money in the world wouldn’t have changed my feelings for you.”

“Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me.”

“I know, I know, but some Indians think you have to act white to make your life better. Some Indians think you become white if you try to make your life better, if you become successful.”

“I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right.”

“‘Yes, oh yes,’ said the other with bitterness. ‘American citizenship is a precious privilege when every goggle-eyed German--’ His anger choked him.”

“Lyle is the bravest, kindest, most wonderful crocodile in the whole, wide world. I would consider it a privilege and a pleasure to have him as out neighbor once more.”

“She got to stay up late and watch TV, and naturally, she was never wrong. ”

“All there was to being white was acting like you were.”

“My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”

“I know you’d prefer to ignore this stuff because you benefit from it, but walking around pretending inequality doesn’t exist won’t make it disappear, Jared. You and Manny, who are equal in pretty much every way apart from race, could commit the same crime, but it’s almost guaranteed that he would receive a harsher punishment than you.”

“People are opting out of vital conversations about diversity and inclusivity because they fear looking wrong, saying something wrong, or being wrong. Choosing our own comfort over hard conversations is the epitome of privilege, and it corrodes trust and moves us away from meaningful and lasting change.”

″‘Lucky boy,’ Ashoke remarks, turning the beautifully sewn pages. ‘Only a few hours old and already the owner of books.’ What a difference, he thinks, from the childhood he has known.”

“My love was a privilege that you abused. I have withdrawn that privilege. You are out of my heart.”

“Technology, access, success, power, privilege- this is only a blessing when accompanied by the second of the cardinal virtues: self-restraint.”

“Of course a man may know every one. Men are welcome to the privilege!”

“I was the same man, whether white or black. Yet when I was white, I received the brotherly-love smiles and the privileges from whites and the hate stares or obsequiousness from the Negroes. And when I was a Negro, the whites judged me fit for the junk heap, while the Negroes treated me with great warmth.”