Wealth & Money Quote by Ethel Waters

It lands like a confession and a dare: prejudice is usually something you deny, not something you announce with a shrug. Coming from Ethel Waters, that bluntness reads less like bigotry than like accumulated evidence speaking back. Waters didn’t grow up with a trust fund’s cushion; she came up through a country that sold Black talent and withheld Black safety. When she says she’s been “prejudiced,” she’s flipping the script on whose biases get called “natural” and whose get labeled “resentment.”

The line works because it’s both personal and structural. “All my life” turns the prejudice into a long-term survival instinct, not a trendy pose. It implies repeated encounters where wealth didn’t just mean comfort; it meant access, impunity, and the power to define respectability. In Waters’s era, rich people weren’t simply richer. They were often the gatekeepers to stages, contracts, hotels, and basic dignity. If you were a Black woman performer navigating segregated venues and exploitative deals, “wealthy people” could easily become shorthand for the people who could smile at your talent while profiting from your limits.

There’s also a performer’s timing in it: the line is funny in its audacity, but the humor is defensive. Waters is refusing the polite expectation that the marginalized must stay gracious toward the powerful. She’s admitting an unpretty feeling to expose an uglier truth: class isn’t just money; it’s a social alibi.