John Ridley: ‘Now, let me tell you something about my generation of black Americans’

John Ridley just won the Oscar for best screenplay, for 12 Years a Slave.

He wrote this for Esquire in 2006. Read the whole thing…

That which retards us is the worst of “us,” those who disdain actual ascendancy gained by way of intellectual expansion and physical toil—who instead value the posture of an “urban,” a “street,” a “real” existence, no matter that such a culture threatens to render them extinct.

“Them” being niggers.