Truth Be Told with Tonya Mosley

We’re the friend you call after a long day. The one who gets it. Through wisdom from some of the greatest thinkers of our time, host Tonya Mosley explores what it means to grow and thrive as a Black person in America while discovering new ways of being that serves as a portal to more love, more healing, and more joy.

When journalist Tonya Mosley began conceptualizing a podcast, she knew she wanted it to be an advice show that flipped the idea of what advice could be on its head. "I wanted answers to questions that were coming up in my own life as a Black person in America," says Mosley. "I thought, what if there was a podcast where we can take on deep and complex topics that are meaningful to people's everyday lives?" That podcast is Truth Be Told, which Mosley launched in 2019 and is Apple Podcasts' featured Spotlight podcast for March 2022.

Mosley, who hosts the weekly show through her production company TMI, has plans to look into what liberation looks like for Black Americans over the next four seasons. In upcoming episodes, she explores the evolution of assimilation and what can be born out of the process of decolonization, with each episode guided through different emotional states like love, anger, and resilience. "I am of the first generation of Black Americans to be born under the full rights of citizenship in this country--the right to vote, to live where I want, go to school where I want, marry who I want," Mosley says. "This podcast is an exploration of what the next leg of liberation means for us as Black Americans. I'm doing this work in my own life, and I thought it would be an amazing step to share it in the form of a podcast so that we can all learn and express ourselves together for the purposes of moving society forward."

The concept for the show took root in March 2019. During a six-week period, Mosley, a radio and television journalist who won an Emmy Award in 2016 for her televised piece "Beyond Ferguson" and several others for her public radio series "Black in Seattle," invited people of color to several community events in Oakland, Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area. Through these listening sessions, she learned that audiences like asking questions about dilemmas and conversations they weren't hearing anywhere else and that they'd want to talk to someone with lived experience. "We wanted to turn the idea of an expert on its head," Mosley says. "Wisdom is what we want. We don't necessarily want what we often coin or term as advice from an expert from an academic level, but more so from lived experience."

With Truth Be Told, Mosley wants a safe space to talk about difficult topics like race and racism by inviting guests who understand these issues firsthand, and look just like their core audience, rather than through the lens of whiteness. "If we're thinking about de-centering whiteness, a lot of people think that means pushing white people to the side in a way that devalues their experiences," Mosley clarifies. "What it really is saying is that we want to do our best to center the lived experiences of everyone who calls this place home. So, what that means is allowing space in the mainstream where we can have these kinds of conversations.”

Truth Be Told is a TMI Production in association with Fearless Media. We are @DearTruthBeTold on Twitter and @deartbt on Instagram. Reach out to us using the hashtag #DearTBT.