Quotes About White Privilege

#1. Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

Jonathan Coleman

#2. We are taught that these are dualisms: Jewish/Arab, public/private, visible/invisible, Black/white, privilege/oppression, pride/shame. But these are false separations that don't exist.

Daisy Hernandez

#3. I believe that reappropriation can be a powerful tool for creating social change. Sometimes, things like irony, satire, or humor are more effective in getting at difficult truths or concepts like white privilege, orientalism, and the exoticization of culture.

Simon S. Tam

#4. We should self-examine and talk about things like our own white privilege and these phony senses of being an artist.

Geoff Rickly

#5. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

Peggy McIntosh

#6. Do I love Black people?
Yes. As much as I love my own race.
Do Black lives matter?
Of course.
Will I oppress my spirit with White Guilt and faulty notions of White Privilege?
Hell no.
Gotta love yourself before you can love anyone else.

Jonathan Heatt

#7. Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.

Adam Mansbach

#8. I want you to admit that there is such a thing as white privilege,

Jon Stewart

#9. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.

Peggy McIntosh

#10. White privilege is the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.

Peggy McIntosh

#11. The question is, What type of human do I want to be? How do I want to use my platform? Do I want to be safe, under the umbrella of my white privilege? Or do I want to push back and resist?

Macklemore

#12. Apologies for the White Privilege. I can't help it.

T.J. Bowes

#13. I know many people on the left are suspicious of words like Americanization. To them, it can sound like a cover for white privilege and warmongering. It suggests arrogance and groupthink. But these connotations are not fixed. It is in our power to reshape them by recalling the best of America.

Eric Liu

#14. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

Peggy McIntosh

#15. Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

Tim Wise

#16. Under this [Bush] Administration, America's middle class has been abandoned
its dreams denied, its Main Street interests ignored and its mainstream values scorned by a White House that puts privilege first.

John F. Kerry

#17. It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely.

Caitlin Doughty

#18. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

Peggy McIntosh

#19. Clementine learned to feel bad about her white middle-class privilege long before it became fashionable.

Liane Moriarty

#20. The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#21. Find a balance between one's responsibility as a white person to confront acts of racism and one's subconscious sense of power and privilege over people of color when reacting to the [racist] event.

Eileen O'Brien

#22. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

E.B. White

#23. No matter how much time I spend here I can't escape the whiteness of my skin, the way I stand out no matter what I do. But it's more than my skin. It's my privilege.

Jessica Posner

#24. We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.

Paule Marshall

#25. The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

Teju Cole

#26. Privilege is driving a smooth road and not even knowing it.

Ampersand

#27. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

#28. Do not sit down in Satan's easy chair of do-little, but arise and aim at the elevated standard which it is your privilege to attain.

Ellen G. White

#29. All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere.
The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

Robert Winder

#30. People buy into this false notion of reverse racism, where they believe that just because there's a group of people getting together to share something about their heritage that we're excluding white people. But that's not the reality.

Simon S. Tam

#31. I'm having the time of my life and the fact that I'm still working - how lucky can you get? I'm 90 years old and still able to work as much as I do. That's a privilege.

Betty White

#32. The poor and people of color are yoked to the abject; white people use its exploration as a path toward self-liberation. It's a valid critique - and one that Broad City has increasingly interrogated, suggesting, especially in later seasons, the extent of Abbi and Ilana's privilege.

Anne Helen Petersen

#33. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated / targeted for those shootings - even though most come at the hands of white dudes.

David Sirota

#34. As a white male in America, I have privilege. As a white male who happens to be an artist with a fan base, I have a platform to spread awareness about that privilege. However, songs about race and privilege are very difficult to A) write and B) dissect as a listener. They're heavy.

Macklemore

#35. You can't control the fact that you are born a white man or born into wealth. When people say, 'Check your privilege,' they're saying, 'Acknowledge how these factors helped you move through life.' They're not saying apologize for it.

Roxane Gay

#36. I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

Sarah Jones

#37. We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive

Martin Luther King Jr.

#38. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another, and so on.

Scott Woods

#39. There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.

Annie Besant

#40. Being blessed with good health gives you the strength and loving what you do and - is a privilege that keeps you going. So I'm just happy as a lark.

Betty White

#41. This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.

Toni Morrison

#42. I have never experienced racism in the feminist movement, so it concerned me to think that I was unable to see the subject clearly because I came from white, middle-class privilege.

Betty Buckley

#43. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#44. I think that a show that is as successful as 'The Golden Girls' is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. If you don't feel proud to be part of a show that has that kind of track record, then shame on you, because that's a privilege.

Betty White

#45. So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets ...

Oscar Wilde

#46. Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.

Robert Winder

#47. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#48. Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

Tim Wise

#49. In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.

Noam Chomsky

#50. it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially from the sickness of racialism.

Russell Banks

#51. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#52. How incredibly easy it is to hide behind white skin, I think, looking at these probable supremacists. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. You're not suspicious. The few black faces in the room stand out in harsh counterpoint.

Jodi Picoult

#53. One question for me and others like me is whether ... we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and, if so, what we will do to lessen them.

Peggy McIntosh

#54. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.
He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.

Malcolm X

#55. I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.

Erin McKeown

#56. All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.

Alice Walker

#57. Privilege means that it's easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help. I

Lindy West

#58. My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.

Robin Morgan

#59. Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good ...

June Jordan

#60. My privilege as a white Jewish American in Israel is a major factor in getting me so much access to the key institutions of the Jewish state.

Max Blumenthal

#61. The world does not need white people to civilize others. The real White People's Burden is to civilize ourselves.

Robert Jensen

#62. It is not earthly rank, nor birth, nor nationality, nor religious privilege, which proves that we are members of the family of God; it is love, a love that embraces all humanity.

Ellen G. White

#63. They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#64. I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

Nell Zink

#65. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.

Audre Lorde

#66. It is a great thing to be a child of God, and joint-heir with Jesus Christ. If this is your privilege, you will know the fellowship of Christ's sufferings.

Ellen G. White

#67. Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.

DaShanne Stokes

#68. Good, modern, civilized Western white men are so easily cowed by charges of bias and privilege that they work tirelessly to outdo each other with social displays of moral universalism - by cucking themselves in every way imaginable. Western

Jack Donovan

#69. You're white. You're straight. You're well educated, healthy and beautiful. Every time is for people like you.

Tiffany Reisz