Quotes About Privilege

How many times have I been put at the front of the line without even knowing there was a line? How many times have I walked through a door that opened, invisibly and silently, for me, but slammed shut for others? How many lines have I cut in a life of privilege?

At its worst, privilege is blindness, allowing us to blithely go on in our god playing, not even aware of the insults to image bearers that happen under our noses every day.

The best way I know to define privilege is the ongoing benefits of past successful exercises of power.

One of power's invisible perquisites is that others grant you deference without your having to ask for it.

was never bound by the narrow expectations of others. But when we examine Jesus' changes of plans more closely, we discover an unmistakable pattern: Jesus' changes of plans almost always took him in the opposite direction of his own privilege. The purpose of every one of Jesus' improvisations was the restoration of image bearing in places where it had been lost. He exercised his power to interrupt in others' interests, never his own.

It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others.

At its worst, privilege is blindness: Amid the vast literature on race and privilege, one especially useful book from a Christian perspective for those from the dominant culture is Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp, Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

The "American Dream" is grounded in the promise of the transcendence of social class boundaries, as in the opportunity to enable one's children to climb the social ladder through educational and financial achievement. The mythology of upward mobility encourages Americans (including many in the academy) to pathologize poverty and disregard the influence of privilege

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women.

This kind of caring for oneself is not about caring for one's own happiness. It is about finding ways to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist. This is why, this is how: those who do not have to struggle for their own survival can very easily and rather quickly dismiss those who attend to their own survival as being self-indulgent. They do not need to attend to themselves; the world does it for them.

It is deemed more polite to assume you are white.

I never met an addict who came from a nice home . I've met addicts that came from families that had money and nice houses. But never from a nice home.

We the people have never agreed on much of anything. ... [D]isunity is the through-line in the national plot. Not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privileged.

disunity is the through line in the national plot—not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other's nerves is our right.

It would never occur to me to wear pink, just as it would never occur to Michael Douglas to play a poor person.

Who controls everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don't need therefore they have. I need, therefore I don't have.

But the best-treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful. Ingratitude, however, is its social function.

Well, you are a privileged character. You're the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.

What provokes me worst of all are our fateful bourgeois distinctions of rank. Of course I know as well as anyone that differences of class are necessary, and that they work greatly to my own advantage: but I wish they would not place obstacles in my way when I might enjoy a little pleasure...

The most privileged position, in life as in society, is that of an educated soldier. Rough warriors, at any rate, remain true to their character, and as great strength is usually the cover for good nature, we get on with them at need.

What is a minority The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren't special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn't privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn't the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion.

The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the thoroughly dispossessed.

The poor man yields to the rich, the plebeian to the noble, the servant to the master, the unlearned to the learned, and yet every one inwardly cherishes some idea of his own superiority.