Class Privilege Quotes

• If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.

  Ayelet Waldman

  White, Class, Firsts

  Source: m.motherjones.com

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• Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

  Gunter Grass

  Class, Feelings, Mind

  "From the Diary of a Snail". Book by Gunter Grass, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

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• To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.

  Joanna Russ

  Class, Usual, Ordinary

  Joanna Russ (1983). “How to Suppress Women's Writing”, p.18, University of Texas Press

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• To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

  Joseph Heller

  Ideas, Class, Tennis

  Joseph Heller (1999). “Catch-22: A Novel”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Thinking, Class, White

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• Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, ... not just the elimination of the male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Sex, Class, Differences

  SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION”

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• We're all self-destructive when we're young. We all rebel. If we don't, there's something wrong. But when a Chicano kid's in a rebellious state, he has nowhere to go but to put himself in jeopardy with the police. When a kid who has some class privilege rebels, he's in a beautiful room and he can buy these horrible CDs and drugs. He's buffered from being a criminal.

  Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Beautiful, Kids, Self

  Interview with Barbara Stahura, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. January 31, 2003.

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