You're listening to a throwback edition of What's Ray Singh, recorded during the early development of the show.

If it sounds different, well, I used to do this whole damn thing on my own.

I've got a bigger team now, but these early episodes were made with love and are absolutely worth listening to.

Enjoy the show.

Slavery was a very bad thing.

But slavery has been over for a very long time.

You see, newly freed blacks were given the ability to work and earn what they needed.

Just look around you at the successful black people all over the country.

Because whatever problems they are for blacks now,

they are primarily their own damn fault.

I mean, people were getting along until Obama came into office. Now, in this statement,

two stupid sides of the same coin called ignorance. Because history is one of those fields where

even people who can't remember a tenth of what was taught in one grade of high school, people

who've read all the books in prison or the incense store, people who saw a black person

once, lovers of soul food and hip-hop, they're all experts on the historic black experience.

From the repository of all black knowledge,

hidden away in the mountains of western North Carolina in a secret location,

down around Meek Camp, up the ball branch road, past a rickety old bridge,

welcome to what raised saying, the podcast.

This podcast has been a long time in the making.

It's been the triangulation of my entire life into a perspective of the black experience in America.

Growing up in poverty through a military career, academics, and storytelling on the live stage, I've been black through every single period of it. On this first

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