Clarence Page Quotes

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

Those who are privileged have little regard for history.

Sadly, the pernicious ironies of privilege talk are generally lost on those who claim to be most aware of privilege.

I've been taught that human nature is such that the place of privilege most often and most naturally leads to a sense of entitlement. The notion that I deserve to be treated as special because I'm privileged. The truth is, privilege should never lead to entitlement.

Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so, obviously, it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don't ourselves experience.

It is privilege that causes evil in the world, not wickedness, and not men.

You can be addicted to White Supremacy and all of the benefits, you can be addicted to male privilege and all of the benefits that comes from it. It's like someone pointing at you and you have a stain on your shirt and you don't even know it.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

I don't think that coming from a privileged background makes you this monster who doesn't feel things.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

It is feasible for someone who comes from a privileged background to understand the privilege they have had and to use the formal political arena in a way that would disperse power and engage with people in their own lives.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

Education in this country is about how to maintain the status quo and to perpetuate racism.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Now that we are in power, we must ask ourselves, ‘how can we develop a truly just system rather than do to the elite what they have done to us?’

To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

The elites benefit from affirmative action programs even when those programs are designed to help the masses.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.

Freedom breeds inequality.