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kwassa

(23,340 posts)
Tue Mar 4, 2014, 12:43 AM Mar 2014

John Ridley, Academy Award winning screenwriter for "12 Years A Slave"

this is from an interview he did at the Toronto Film Festival.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/12-years-a-slave-screenwriter-john-ridley-thinks-we-worry-to


(interviewer)
Any time pretty much anything addresses race directly, some real ugliness almost rises up to it. Are you prepared for that?

JR: As an individual, and I have to say as a person of color, the thing about being an “other” in America is I really feel like you’re bilingual. I’m from a small town in Wisconsin, but even when I’m in New York and I’m working for MSNBC or CNN, you’re used to being the only black person in the room. You spend your life in this space where you’re constantly seeing people who don’t even know perhaps they’re being a little dismissive of people of color, let alone the ugliness that you hear on a daily basis. So at times when people say that [racism] is bubbling up, it’s just bubbling up to a level where they’re aware of it.

For me, when you look at where we are and what it takes now in 2013 to get those things to bubble up — if the worst that will most likely happen is that some individual who refuses to put their name on [an internet] thread is going to say something nasty? I say, fine, if that is your true color. I will use the word: People freak out about the word “nigger.” I hear so many more horrible things said about people on a daily basis than that word, and if we’ve gotten to a point in America where we’re so sensitive about that word, then we’re nearing the end of our worries about that, you know what I’m saying?
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