He had hustled most of his life and was worried that I was headed down the same road. It wasn't until I had a conversation with one of my older cousins one summer afternoon that I changed my mind. Despite that, I barely graduated high school thanks to my "fuck school" mentality throughout. My mind was also filled with meaningless pop culture references that most of my friends weren't that up on.
I was accused of "acting white" like Carlton a bunch growing up because I was into sci-fi flicks and read books. I had no idea how much Fresh Prince would seep into my own coming-of-age.
Will constantly struggled to shake his hood mentality while Carlton was reminded that he wasn’t “black enough” at every turn. This was a constant theme throughout the series. Will was there to remind everybody where they came from, but in doing so he came to realize the world was bigger than the streets of West Philly. Carlton was the sell-out who dressed in sport coats, talked proper, and listened to Tom Jones. Their two oldest kids “acted white.” Hilary was the ditzy shopper, spoiled beyond belief. One a judge, the other a college professor. Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv (the first one, anyway) represented strong parents who wanted a different life for their kids. The Fresh Prince gave us jewels on the regular. Without it I probably wouldn't have gone to college. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air changed my life. Our role models not only included family, we also looked up to drug dealers because they had things we couldn’t afford. A stray bullet can hit you on an innocent trip to the bodega. Luck is an underrated thing-people that worked hard and changed their environments take that for granted. Peer pressure is a motherfucker when you’re just a kid.
Most of the time our parents weren’t around because they worked a ton of hours, which made it way too easy to cut class in some of the public schools in our area. But those things do not equate to success in the ghetto. We grew up in supportive family structures. We had access to education and teachers that cared. Thirty years later, after mass demonstrations thrust the issues of racial injustice and police brutality to the forefront of the national debate, the show is being remade as a drama for Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, and the original cast will reunite for a special that arrives on HBO Max on Thursday.Ī look back at the original “Fresh Prince” and other sitcoms of its era that focused on the lives of Black Americans shows how, even within confines of the three-camera format, these programs explored complicated issues of racial injustice, often in ways that walked a fine line between comedy and tragedy.In my neighborhood, “acting white” was an unfortunate thing we accused people of doing. The scene, which played to howls of studio-audience laughter in a 1990 episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” portrayed a scenario that was all too familiar to many people of color: being racially profiled by the police. He gets out of the car and flops down on the hood, arms spread, while his sheltered, wealthy cousin from Bel-Air looks on, dumbfounded. One, having grown up in West Philadelphia, has the wary look of someone who knows exactly how the situation will unfold. Two Black teenagers in a Mercedes-Benz are pulled over by the police.