Friends of mine have created the digital positivity zone for African Americans called Bdestiny.com. It highlights entertainment, politics and lifestyles issues. It portrays blacks in a positive light, and provides useful as well as fun bits of information for readers.
With BDestiny.com, the great thing is that the content and the INtent provide a framework for rich family conversations. The site reminds me of what I used to get watching TV from the early evening into the night, when I grew up. From the time my dad got home at 5:30, until I went to bed around 9 or 10 or 11 (depending on my age), the televisoin was on. Because of the FCC, TV programs provided basic information and entertainment that was family-friendly. BDestiny.com does that. We watched a series of programs, and we didn't call them news, features, sports, etc. We called them dad's, mom's, Sean's, Beaver's, Billy's, and Tresa's. But each of "our" programs was one that the whole family could watch and learn something from, or critique. We got as much from the experience of sharing with one another about "our" programs as we did from the content itself that was being delivered to us.
Common time unites families, and spending time reading what's at BDestiny.com can become the grist for common time in the same way those TV programs grounded talks in my family's living room or at our dinner table.
The site's editors have a point of view - a decidedly positive one. Not because it sells - although it certainly does, and I hope they ultimately make tons of dough from their effort. But their site reflects their attitudes and their sense that what the world needs now isn't just love but reconstruction: and black people need it and deserve it as much as anybody else.
The neatest thing might be that they're really serving an audience broader than "blacks" or "African Americans." Anybody with access to media that competes with BDestiny.com has to find that what's in many of those other places - the abundance of empty rhetoric and useless, graphic, explicit content - is offensive and unhelpful. BDestiny.com is serving readers who are seekers of nourishment of an informational and spiritual sort, with an unabashedly African American bent, to boot.
And with so much of American culture dominated by African American sensibilities anyway, non-black web surfers find themselves at Bdestiny.com quite naturally: because what they're looking for is there as sure as it's on msn.com, slate.com, TheRoot.com, or the web versions of Ebony and Jet magazine. And Fox! (Just kidding.)
If you haven't already pointed your browser there, check out BDestiny.com. Not just because they list my blog as one worth reading. (Smile.) It'll put something good into your soul and fortify your spirit. It'll help the BDestiny.com site creators continue to dispel the all-too-prevalent "negativity narratives" taking up so much space in our virtual and actual universes.
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