Let me begin by saying that I do not blame the podcast community, perhaps apart from the far right portion of it, for the lack of diversity in podcasting. It is a fairly new medium and new mediums take time to flourish. But podcasting is growing fast and with that growth has come a growth in the diversity of the podcast audience. More and more minorities are beginning to make podcasts a part of their everyday life. This has happened because podcasts are pretty much on their way to becoming the new radio, with more of the nation and the world having easy access to portable electronic devices. Though podcasts are mostly listened to on phones, they are also consumed on laptops, perhaps when people should be working. I see you! But I'm not going to tell your boss. I'm no snitch. So what does all of this mean? Well, with a diverse audience comes diverse responsibilities to said audience. I am not demanding that anyone change their opinions. Even if I disagree with someone, I never make it a point to try to change their mind about it; I simply want my side of the story to be told. There are more sides to every story than you can count so it becomes increasingly popular to be exposed to as many as possible in order to make the most informed decision. I put an emphasis on owning a black podcast because there simply are not many black podcast hosts to represent the black community. I also do it because it is an easy medium if you know what you are doing and the potential to create a new black renaissance in media is sitting at our fingertips. For the first time in a long time we have a pretty effective way of breaking into entertainment without having to mask our real identities, without having our ideas run through a whitewash process that destroys our creativity, our uniqueness. If you know the game, you can really propel yourself to the top over a brief period of time, about three years to be exact. Imagine that, three years of really hard work, of getting the word out in a timely fashion and we can not only be entertaining, but own the rights to our entertainment. There is no one there to tell us what to say for once so we should definitely jump on it. In this episode I pose some reasons why we do not see more minorities in entertainment even as our audiences grow more diverse. I talk about the snap reaction to justify exclusion is inherent in America's culture. New technologies are generally not available en masse to minority communities until much later in the game. You also have this misconception I often hear from people that being black or talking about black issues on podcast is automatically going to get you hated by many people. That is not true at all. There are a lot of people who just like to hear real talk these days and you would probably be surprised how some of them look or what they stand for. It is also that many people are just afraid to be themselves on an open microphone. The truth is that most people are looking for a great story teller when they hear a podcast and you can only do that if you are comfortable in your own skin. It is also hard for some people to take the criticism that comes along with podcasting. They do not realize that many social media accounts are fake and that a lot of the harassment is not even sincere. They also probably believe that there is not much money in it, but minorities should realize what a great long term investment podcasts are. They generate a great deal of engagement for large companies and could likely do the same for black companies. What else is great is that we do not have to cancel anyone to have a more diverse group of voices out there on our favorite listening devices. No one needs to be fired or through a bitch fit because a minority took their job. Nope, all we have to do is encourage minorities to spread their messages with technology and promote their businesses to an audience that is always hungry for something different. Black is the new alternative!