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Ray Christian

Award-winning storyteller, retired Army paratrooper, and host of the PRX podcast "What's Ray Saying?", which explores Black American history through personal narrative.

Jan 15, 2026

49:31
not.
49:32
You can't touch them.
49:33
They don't want to be touched or handled.
49:37
But she did.
49:37
I mean, it's supposed to show favorites.
49:42
She survived a lot.
49:44
We had a really hard winter.

5 MINS LATER

55:10
So then how did you get back home?
4:16
[upbeat music]
4:31
I hated being a paperboy.
4:33
I hated it.
4:36
It, it was difficult for me to understand how some boys were even successful at it.
4:41
Paperboys ended up being places they wouldn't normally be.
4:46
I would say in this part of the neighborhood, probably more than a third of the houses were abandoned, either burned out by fires or they had just dilapidated from disrepair.
4:57
Um, the streetlights had been out.

7 MINS LATER

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12:02
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2:47
Really? (laughs)
2:47
... underpasses of a highway once, under the bottom, like Spider-Man, you know? But that was, that was me.
2:53
I was that kid.
2:54
And when I joined, I was around other people like that, broken football players and high school wrestlers and hunters and guys who ran and boxed.
3:05
And you grew up a little, a little edgy, you know? So why do you do it? If you come from my background or people who come from blue-collar backgrounds who do dangerous work anyway, if you work in mines, if you work in tunnels, if you work on the roadways, you work on top of scaffolds puttin' buildings together, the blue-collar world is already dangerous.
6:34
A burning desire to defend the homeland? Less so.
6:39
Very few people join with any understanding of that kinda global ideas.
6:45
The politics is so probably low down on the scale in terms of people having views about the right and wrong of deployments and the US military actions abroad.

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