442 Quotes About Privilege

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.

When acts of kindness and calls for civility are fueled by social, economic, and racial privilege, these acts are often more about doing just enough to keep the status quo and not about transformative change for those who are experiencing struggle.

We demand the economic empowerment of the masses through an enormous redistribution of wealth from the privileged to the people. We demand a system of total social mobility i.e. we demand the complete abolition of the force obstructing social mobility: privilege. We demand that those people living on the margins, the fringes of society, be restored to the mainstream and have their dignity returned to them. Nobody people versus Somebody people. It’s time for the nobodies to win.

Being privileged doesn't mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.

Her husband was sent to boarding school at an early age and though deprived of his family's presence, their name was always ahead of him, opening every door.

They had an assured income, nothing could disturb their calm.

Let us just say that the idea of struggling to make my way in a world of privileged, affluent people exhausted me before I even tried: I was the child of nothing, I had neither beauty not charm, neither past nor ambition; I had not the slightest savoir-fare or sparkle. There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demands upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

Not all the guests are beautiful, but they all have a certain something. A wellness, maybe. Terrible things may happen to any person, rich or poor, white or brown, and I'm sure terrible things have happened to some of they, but they don't appear so. They appear like they believe the universe loves them, and maybe it does.