Patricia Hill Collins Quotes

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

You must get engaged with people who are far less privileged than you. I think you must devote your time if not your resources... Because it is very, very important from the point of view of the development of our country.

I'm ashamed to say that I'm from a very privileged background.

When I was growing up, I only saw really brown people on 'The Cosby Show,' and they were rich, and their parents were doctors. It wasn't like my home.

Many books that tell you how to achieve come from a privileged position. If you can't see yourself in the advice, how can you use it?

I've been doing charity work since I'm 20 years old, and now I want to help kids.

We all have choices. (Astrid) No we don’t, princess. Only people with money and influence have choices. For the rest of us, basic necessity dictates what we have to do to survive. (Zarek)

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others... It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

It's crazy for somebody who's kind of empowered and wealthy like myself to say, "Oh, I don't need to be patronized by the state, I can make my own choices." But I've got things to look forward to, and places to go and if that'd been me there forty years ago, when I was a young kid in Muirhouse, it might've been a different story.

The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.

Stuff Happens.’ That’s the G-rated version. That’s a bumper sticker that only a straight white upper middle class male could have made. Because anyone who isn’t straight, anyone who isn’t male, anyone who isn’t white, anyone who isn’t upper middle class knows that stuff doesn’t just happen. Stuff gets done by people to people. Nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is random. This isn’t osmosis. And so we act as if it’s this passive thing, but yet that’s not the case.

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

That divide between the rich and poor is so crazy, because even white kids are suffering now.

I just focus on my work with inner-city kids, and in my community, and on my philanthropic work.

Let me tell you what would be a really, really great project for all of us. Why don't we start mentoring kids? Whether we're liberal or conservative, why don't we start going into the schools and giving the kids a sense of their own purpose, their own self-worth, their future, and what they can learn from us? You know, if we're mentoring kids together, we might actually begin to talk to one another again and listen to one another. We have a big crisis all over the country and in our state on drugs.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

President [Barack] Obama has been an unbelievable divider of this country, whether it's rich and poor; white and black.

Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.

Living in Portland, which is a predominantly white city, the privilege and the luxury to be able to obsess over a certain kind of minutia, that I think, if you did not have that privilege, would never be bothersome. When people are worried about whether "local" means 100 miles, or 50 miles, or 10 miles from a grocery store, I just think, "Wow. What a privilege it is to have that as a major concern in your life." As opposed to, "Can we afford food tonight?" Sometimes I'm just shocked at what becomes concerning in these kind of communities.

My mate asked me "What do you think of voluntary work?" I said "I wouldn't do it if you paid me."

The bias against the show is purely elitist. We're all like the people on the show - the difference is that some of us speak better, or were born richer. There's nothing that happens on my show that rich people don't experience.