The world of storytelling continues to grow and evolve thanks to platforms like kweliTV!
As a streaming platform that features more than 500 undiscovered, award-winning indie films, documentaries, web series and kids shows that celebrate global Black stories, Kweli TV is here to show the power that comes with the space and opportunity to share our own narratives.
“It really started with me not feeling like I saw myself represented and not enough stories about Black life beyond Black suffering,” shared DeShuna Spencer, CEO, and founder of kweliTV, during the latest episode of AfroTech’s Black Tech Green Money (BTGM) podcast with host Will Lucas.
As a former journalist, Spencer realized the time that was spent writing the narratives of people who look like her.
“One of the things about working in the daily news is that you spend so much time writing these narratives,” she continued. “And I really started with some research and understood the correlation between implicit bias in media representation. Once it started to become clear to me, I wanted to use our platform to change that and not just from an African American lens, but from a global lens.”
Spencer’s platform has opened doors for creatives like Sean B. the creator of Connect, the series, which is now available for streaming on kweliTV.
“With Connect, it’s just as DeShuna mentioned, from the aspect of showing stories where I wasn’t seeing myself represented,” he shared during the BTGM episode. “The mainstream media is sort of packaging this view about the Black experience without our say or people who look like us, and so we really want to have a space in which we are the ones who control the narrative.”
For more on how the two double down on the need for Black ownership over the Black narrative and how the media constructs our world view, listen to the full episode of the Black Tech Green Money podcast below.
