Pitch Cool - DeShuna Spencer

From Netflix to Amazon Prime, HBO to Apple TV, there’s no shortage of streaming services fighting for our eyeballs with new and exciting shows – to the extent that catching up on a must-watch series can feel like a chore. Yet for people of colour, that same content is saturated with negative stereotypes and monotonous storylines. Trying to find authentic stories about the Black community, from a Black perspective, can feel like a fruitless exercise in channel-surfing.

It was precisely this scenario which led journalist DeShuna Spencer to launch kweliTV. “I wanted to see stories that properly represented the Black experience,” she recalls. “I was flipping through cable TV shows, and it was the same old stories. Where were the Black stories that I wanted to see? I went on Netflix, and they had some Black films, but it still wasn’t what I was looking for. It wasn’t enough.” 

Read DeShuna Spencer, founder of Kweli.TV, full story in Pitch Cool