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"The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" is one of the most memorable shows in American television. Its ability to tackle so many social issues and still remain relevant amongst the youth has made it an important method of teaching different life lessons.

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"The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" Mistaken Identity (TV Episode 1990)

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Directed by Jeff Melman. With Will Smith, James Avery, Janet Hubert, Alfonso Ribeiro. While Philip and Vivian go on a trip to Palm Springs in Mr. Furth's helicopter, Will and Carlton drive Furth's car there as well. They get pulled over for "stealing" the car. Hilary babysits Ashley as Geoffrey has the weekend off.

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Most shows need time to mature, some requiring a season or two to find their legs if the audience or platform will allow them that space to develop. Blending cast, writing, and rhythm is often an ungainly disjointedness masked by a charismatic star or the fact that the series serves an overlooked audience.

Case in point, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a show beloved by a generation yet so synonymous with Will Smith's rise to stardom and Alfonso Ribeiro's Carlton Dance that revisiting its first season proves a tour through uneven storytelling terrain.

Many early episodes veer between Smith's manic physical humor contrasted against the wealthy but uptight new family and a variety of socially conscious coming of age tropes built on his fish-out-of-water "kid from west Philadelphia, born and raised" who "became the prince of a town called Bel Air" without ever finding a comfortable balance between those two elements.

So, it's more than a little surprising to find the singular episode of The Fresh Prince, "Mistaken Identity," clocking in at Episode Six of Season One. I mean, this installment is but a mere handful of episodes removed from Smith silently mouthing the lines of his costars on camera while waiting for his own. And yet, the phrase "lightning in a bottle" exists for a reason.

Let's be clear: "Mistaken Identity" is still raw compared to the later episodes most fans consider the show's best. Case in point, the best scene of the series comes in Season Four's "Papa's Got a Brand-New Excuse." Confronted with once again being let down by his absentee father (played with a phenomenally understated vulnerability by Ben Vereen), Smith improvised a monologue of broken self-sufficiency and shed real tears. And James Avery's equally real response as Uncle Phil to gather Smith up in his arms was beautiful.

But it's that very authenticity that causes those four minutes overshadow the other 18 in the episode, leaving the two parts out of step with each other.

Another incandescent moment comes in final scene of the series' final episode, "I, Done" when the cast said goodbye to each other on camera, leaving Will standing alone in the empty Bel Air mansion he'd first come to six seasons earlier.

The moment is poignant if a little overwrought, undercut by a slap-stick final moment of Carlton running through the scene with his pants half down, afraid he's being left behind as the family moves to New York. While powerful, this scene was more a well-deserved victory lap for the cast that ends up more cohesive with the series as a whole than its specific episode

What other episodes lack in cohesiveness, however, can be found in "Mistaken Identity," which is the first to thread the needle between the show's often brash humor and its honest engagement with serious social issues.

The plot was simple. Carlton volunteers to drive a Mercedes belonging a partner at his father's law firm from L.A. to Palm Springs where he will meet his family for a weekend getaway. Will tags along without telling him and the two get lost, eventually getting pulled over and racially profiled by small town police officers (one played with a useful flatness of affect by Hank Azaria).

This section of the show establishes both the light-hearted humor that drives the odd-couple dynamic of Will and Carlton's relationship (Will frightens him by jumping out of the back seat in Freddy Krueger mask). It also captures the tension created by the over-policing of black men, prompting Will to give a socially clueless Carlton "The Talk" about how to interact with the police as safely as possible when pulled over, a scene that manages to carry the weight of the moment while riding the humor in Smith's over-the-top persona.

The two are held in the local jail after the officers claim they have confessed to stealing cars-a situation worsened by Carlton's insistence on trusting the system-until Uncle Phil, Aunt Viv (played with brilliant motherly anger by Janet Huber) show up to get them released. They are also demeaned by the officers, despite their affluence and righteous indignation, until Phil's white partner shows up and the demeanor in the room shifts completely.

The show ends in the Banks' mansion where everyone is visibly shaken except Carlton, who clings to his illusions of fairness in the system until both Will and his father shake it loose. The final scene, then, is Carlton alone on the couch as the realization of the racial injustice he faces slowly spreads across his face.

This moment, then, becomes the bar for determining which episodes of The Fresh Prince stand up in their entirety. In "Mistaken Identity," everyone is confronted simultaneously with their privilege and lack thereof in the face of systemic racial injustice, a confrontation threaded through the entire show that comes to a head in its final scene.

Carlton's illusions of fairness are met with the messier reality that, because he is black, the system offers him no extra favor even if he adheres to it. Uncle Phil is crestfallen to realize the affluent life he built to shield his children from these racial realities can't protect them. And Will's feelings about inequality are reinforced in a fresh way when he witnesses the collapse of his cousin's naive expectations.

Yet all of this is accomplished without losing the humor that will serve as the show's chief tone-setting element for the rest of its run. In essence, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air finds itself in the elements of this episode, and that what makes it the show's one perfect iteration.

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ONE PERFECT EPISODE / The Fresh Prince of Bel Air: "Mistaken Identity" / Michael Dean Clark I Drunk Monkeys | Literature + Film

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Most shows need time to mature, some requiring a season or two to find their legs if the audience or platform will allow them that space to develop. Blending cast, writing, and rhythm is often an ungainly disjointedness masked by a charismatic star or the fact that the series serves an overlooked audience.

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Benny Medina in 2013. ANGELA GEORGE, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

By DANIEL CERONE
First Published - JULY 1, 1990

In 1990, Will Smith, a 21-year-old rapper known as the Fresh Prince, had just got a job with NBC. His job expectations, as implied by his boss, NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, are threefold:

To bring the black street world of hip-hop to American TV audiences.

To star in a sitcom bearing his name that will be the network's first "hit-the-ground running hit" since "The Golden Girls" five years ago.

To be a "big, breakout star" along the lines of, oh, say Eddie Murphy.

"Brandon Tartikoff is making me nervous, comparing me to Eddie Murphy and stuff like that," Smith said after Tartikoff made the comments.

"Hey, hey, slow down a little bit." He chuckled. "Let me practice first. This has all happened so fast my head's spinning a little bit."

Smith sounded exhausted, speaking on a telephone from a hotel room in Washington, D.C., where he was meeting affiliates to promote his new fall show, "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."

The sitcom is backed by first-time TV producer Quincy Jones. It's about a funky byproduct of Philadelphia's gang-infested streets who is sent out West to live with his wealthy upper-crust cousins, whose plush lifestyle has buried their black roots.

Smith quickly points out that the sitcom is not about rapping. It took me a while to make NBC understand-and they understand now- they don't want rap. They think they want rap performers, but no. What they want is a hip show.

"Rap music-which a lot of white America doesn't understand-rap music is not just a music. Rap music is a subculture: hip-hop. It's a style of dress, an attitude, a look, a language. It's more than just music.

For a middle-class kid from Philadelphia who never acted before, Smith is being asked to shoulder a load that might wobble the knees of Murphy himself. He's network televisson's first embodiment of a fresh generation. He's a prime-time tap into the urban street market, which is pumping rap music, loud new fashions and an Afrocentric political consciousness into mainstream society faster than the booming bass tracks of a def jam.

Warren Littlefield, Tartikoff's right-man hand at NBC, said the network had been searching for a way to catch the wild rap tiger by the tail for some time.

"We were all looking at Newsweek and Time and seeing these cover stories (about rap music)," he explained. "I was personally watching 'Yo! MTV Raps' and just feeling waves of something new and contemporary running through various streams of culture in America. We felt there was a drum beat going on out there, and we looked at our development (schedule) and said, 'It's not represented.' "

Smith, one-half of D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, endeared himself to kids everywhere in 1988 with the sympathetic rap hit "Parents Just Don't Understand," about a shopping trip he takes with his mother for back-to-school clothes. Although the duo's record sales have slipped since then, the bubble-gum rappers are still hopping. Their 900-number hotline, which will be used to promote an upcoming album, has set a music industry precedent by grossing a reported $10 million since its debut two years ago.

"I think Will's a star," said Jones, a celebrated music producer/composer with 19 Grammys to his credit. "He really makes it pop. He's got this magical sense of timing that's unbelievable. Right now he's not even thinking about it; he's just doing his own thing. He's going to be dangerous when he finds out where the cameras are."

The real-life inspiration for "Fresh Prince" came from co-producer Benny Medina. "It was partially based upon the way I was brought up, a juxtaposition I was thrown into at an early age," Medina said. "I came from a broken home in Watts, and I was in and out of juvenile detention facilities and foster homes."

Medina was living at St. Elmo Village, a Los Angeles community home center, when Jack Elliot, a white TV film composer living in Beverly Hills with a wife and three kids, decided to give Medina a chance. "They let me move in with them," he said. "I fixed up their garage in the back of the house and became part of the family. The deal was I had to keep a job, keep the grades up and be respectful of household rules."

Medina wound up at Beverly Hills High School with the children of Motown kingpin Barry Gordy and eventually started working for Gordy as a junior executive at Motown. Today, Medina is head of black music at Warner Bros. When he and partner Jeff Pollack recently began developing TV projects, including an animated series that may go to Fox called "Hip-Hop Junior High," Medina instantly thought back to his childhood.

"One problem I found growing up in a ghetto (is) you have a very limited perspective of what you think the world is. Moving from one extreme to the other gave me a real clear picture of how people get held back on the basis of their situation.

"We adjusted the premise of the sitcom to fit Will. My upbringing didn't have much comedy in it. Most of the kids I grew up with, if they're still alive, they're in Watts right now. Four of the six cats I grew up with are dead. I'm 30."

Medina met Smith in December at "The Arsenio Hall Show," which was celebrating Jones' acclaimed comeback album "Back on the Block," when Smith asked Medina for directions to a Lakers game. Soon after, Pollack began hearing second-hand raves about Smith after the rapper's performance on Disney's 35th anniversary TV special for NBC. Director John Landis cast Smith in the special based on his energetic performance in the music video for "Parents Just Don't Understand."

"Disney wanted to do a musical number," Landis said, Rand they gave me a list of the same old boring names and said, 'Choose one.' I said, 'Gee, the Disney song catalogue is so marvelous, let's get somebody fresh.' I suggested Fresh Prince and D.J. Jazzy Jeff, and Disney basically said, 'Who? What?'

"But you should have heard them. They rapped 'Supercalifragilistic.' " Landis broke into a brief rap-'Let's take an umdiddly break...' -and started laughing. "I was raving about them."

Medina and Pollack contacted Smith, who joined the project immediately. "It was real," Smith said. "That's what everyone's missing on TV. You've probably seen that Tide commercial where the kid stands up on the washing machine and starts rapping, 'Mom my clothes are dirty/Gotta get some Tide/Go get some.' America needs to see that there are intelligent, articulate black people, and what better place to see them than on television?"

The producers took their idea to -uincy Jones, who they knew was in meetings with NBC to develop TV projects. "I'm not a big fan of TV at all," said Jones, who is also working on a syndicated talk show with Jesse Jackson. "But blacks have been repressed on TV for so long. When I was young, there was nothing on the radio for blacks. It was like black people didn't exist.

"Now there's such a vibrant new culture, in all its different hues, that has never been dealt with before. Everyone always thought of blacks in a sharecropper situation. A white person isolated in Iowa sees blacks on the TV set and thinks that's what black people are like, and they're always wrong. I want to change that."

"Quincy understands rap music," Smith said. "You know, he was pretty much there for the past 30 years of music. His input is valuable, because he understands, where someone else, you know, his age, wouldn't. Whereas I can't communicate what I'm trying to say to an executive, or someone I can't explain what hip is to- they think hip is rap music-Quincy can. He's a good mediator."

"Fresh Prince" was in line with NBC's fall goal of more youth-oriented programming. But by this time it was mid-March-late to get a new fall show going-and there was no script, no cast and no Fresh Prince. Their future star was in Indiana on a concert tour.

NBC wanted to see Smith "now" to find out if he could act. So Smith traveled 17 hours straight by bus and plane to make it to Los Angeles. A screen test was arranged at Jones' home on his 57th birthday, the same night he received a lifetime achievement award from "Soul Train."

"I went straight home from the show," Jones said. "It was about 10 p.m., and 20 NBC cars were lined up at my house. They all wanted to see Fresh Prince."

Smith emerged from an upstairs bedroom where he was studying a scene from an old sitcom pilot that was developed for singer Morris Day. NBC's Littlefield described the scene: "You gotta know, if you're a network programmer and it's late in the pilot season game and you're looking for a hit show, my heart starts to pound at this point. Will says, 'OK, so I'm just going to, like, read this scene, huh? Now, who are the guys from the network?'

"Then he did a couple of little scenes from this failed sitcom script, and he just hit it. If he's a ball player, he hit a home run. We stood up, hugged him. I kissed Quincy and said, 'Thank you. Let's go to work.' "

NBC brought in veteran writers Andy and Susan Borowitz to write the pilot (he was co-creator, executive producer and head writer of "Day by Day" and she was producer and writer for "Family Ties"). Smith was given the freedom to adapt his dialogue to suit his hip-hop lingo. Tartikoff even got in on the act, writing two jokes for the pilot.

Littlefield said the pilot tested at record-breaking levels with kids and teens, better than "The Cosby Show" did. NBC ordered 12 episodes to premiere in September on Monday nights.

"I think it's rare in television or in film to find an actor and a character who leaps out at you," Littlefield said. "As broadcasters we've been saying to ourselves for years, "Where's the next Eddie Murphy?" What we found with Will is someone unique and distinctive unto himself. We took a contemporary musical artist and crafted a character who is a perfect fit. In no way is this an effort to put a rap show on the air. This is an effort to put Will Smith on the air. That's who we're banking on."

Updaste 2021.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ran for 148 episodes over six seasons.

A reunion special/retrospective reuniting the original cast debuted on HBO Max on November 18, 2020, one day ahead of schedule. A more dramatic reboot based on the fan film Bel-Air is in active development, with a two-season order for Peacock.

The series was originally produced by NBC Productions in association with the Stuffed Dog Company and Quincy Jones Entertainment (later Quincy Jones-David Salzman Entertainment in 1993). After the show was released to syndication in 1994, the series was distributed by Warner Bros. Television Distribution, which continues to distribute the show worldwide (although NBCUniversal owns the series' copyright).

Currently, reruns of the series air on MTV2, BET, and VH1, having previously been aired on WGN America, TBS, Nick at Nite, TeenNick, Disney XD, ABC Family, Centric, MTV, and CMT.

The series developed significant popularity in the United Kingdom, where it aired on BBC Two between 1991 and 1996 with reruns airing on the network between 1996 and 2004, and was shown alongside The Simpsons and was later repeated on Trouble, Bravo, Channel One, Living, Sky Living Loves, Viva, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Comedy Central Extra and 5Star. In the United Kingdom, all series became available on the BBC iPlayer from 1 January 2021, and also currently airs on Sky Comedy. It also aired on CBC in Canada.

The series became available to stream on HBO Max on May 27, 2020. It streams in Canada on Crave.

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A Breath of Fresh Prince : How it Started and Benny Medina's early life story

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Benny Medina in 2013. ANGELA GEORGE, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS By DANIEL CERONE First Published - JULY 1, 1990 In 1990, Will Smith, a 21-year-old rapper known as the Fresh Prince, had just got a job with NBC.

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A generation ago, sitcoms with largely Black casts were must-see TV, balancing humor and drama. Will the "Bel-Air" reboot resonate in the era of Black Lives Matter?

Will Smith, left, and the cast of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" reunited for a special that arrives on HBO Max on Thursday. And Peacock is planning "Bel-Air," a reboot of the '90s comedy as a drama, with a new cast. Credit... HBO

Two Black teenagers in a Mercedes-Benz are pulled over by the police.

One, having grown up in West Philadelphia, has the wary look of someone who knows exactly how the situation will unfold. 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.

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.

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.

A 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.

"We were funnier the more real we were," said Jasmine Guy, who played a spoiled Southerner on "A Different World," a spinoff of "The Cosby Show" that ran from 1987 to 1993 and focused on students at Hillman, a fictional historically Black college.

Painful subjects like racial profiling, tokenism, the daily indignities of racism and colorism were mined for laughs that revealed deeper truths, said Frederick W. Gooding, an associate professor of African-American studies at Texas Christian University.

"Blacks have always had the challenge of playing the role of the jester where humor is used as protection against salient truths the king's court tends to ignore," he said.

Morgan Cooper, 28, was in the second grade when he first saw the racial profiling scene in a rerun of "The Fresh Prince." It was around the same time that his father told him how to react if they were ever stopped by the police.

For a Black boy growing up in Kansas City, Mo., the episode was revelatory, he said.

"I feel seen and I feel heard through this family," he recalled thinking. "Though 'Fresh Prince' was a 30-minute sitcom, it was still planting seeds. It really used comedy as a Trojan Horse into these ideas."

In 2019, Mr. Cooper filmed a three-and-a-half-minute trailer that reimagined the sitcom as a drama called "Bel-Air," with the principal character, Will, being sent to live with his rich uncle and aunt after he is caught with a gun. Mr. Cooper released it on YouTube, where it has been viewed nearly 6.7 million times.

The trailer got the attention of Will Smith, who played Will in the original series. He helped Mr. Cooper secure a two-season deal for "Bel-Air" on Peacock. Both men are now executive producers of the new show.

When "The Fresh Prince" premiered in 1990, networks, encouraged by the success of "The Cosby Show" and the rise of hip-hop, were investing in sitcoms featuring Black actors.

The 1990s "represents a moment in television history where you see the introduction of perhaps the greatest or largest number of Black situation comedies to ever be offered up," said Robin Means Coleman, a professor who specializes in media, culture and identity at Texas A&M University.

But the shows varied in how they tackled racial tension, if they tackled it all. "The Cosby Show," for example, steered largely clear of the subject.

In its first season, "A Different World" continued that tradition, featuring conventional plots like one episode in which students carried an egg in a basket to learn about parental responsibility.

Then Debbie Allen took over as director and the show began exploring more serious topics. "We dealt with everything," Ms. Allen said. "We dealt with date rape, racism, the L.A. riots."

"A Different World" became so well known for its social awareness that it was parodied on the sketch comedy show "In Living Color."

But there were still limitations.

Ms. Allen said she was not allowed to show a condom in an episode about AIDS. And Ms. Guy recalled that the network remained reluctant to air that episode even after Whoopi Goldberg and Tisha Campbell, who had appeared in "School Daze" and "Little Shop of Horrors," agreed to guest star in it. "It always felt like we were so behind and they weren't letting us free," she said.

Cree Summer, who played the free-spirited Freddie on the show, said there "was a time where the censorship went very deep on these sitcoms." Marveling at Ms. Allen's determination, she added, "I don't know how in the hell she got away with it."

Even the most racially conscious shows maintained a bright outlook that fit the optimistic, glossy tone of the 1990s.

There was no social media to give near daily reminders of racial injustice, said Daphne Maxwell Reid, who played Vivian, the matriarch on "The Fresh Prince," from 1993 to 1996.

"We were innocent," Ms. Reid said. "The economy was just chugging along. People were going about their growth and their lives in a more innocent way. They weren't worried about the death of democracy."

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Alfonso Ribeiro, left, and Mr. Smith in an episode of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." Credit... NBC

So when the shows did confront hard topics, the effect was that much more dramatic, Mr. Cooper said.

"Family Matters," a softhearted ABC series about a working-class Black family in Chicago, was known more for the antics of the buffoonish character Steve Urkel than for its take on racial politics.

From left, Jo Marie Payton, Reginald VelJohnson, Kellie Shanygne Williams and Jaleel White as Steve Urkel in "Family Matters." Credit... ABC

But in 1994, the show aired "Good Cop, Bad Cop," in which Sergeant Carl Winslow, played by Reginald VelJohnson, confronts two white officers who stopped his son, Eddie, while he was driving.

The episode was written after the actor who played Eddie, Darius McCrary, told the producers he had been racially profiled while driving.

"The writers always had their hand on the pulse of America and society," Mr. VelJohnson said. "I applaud them for their bravery and good sense to write an episode like that."

The promise that those early '90s shows would usher in a new and permanent era of programs with largely Black casts had largely fizzled by the early 2000s.

By then, "The Cosby Show," "A Different World," "Family Matters" and "Fresh Prince" had all ended their network runs. UPN and WB, two networks that featured shows with Black casts, stopped broadcasting by the mid-2000s.

More recently, shows like "Atlanta," "Blackish" and "Insecure" have centered their plots around the lives of Black families and young professionals as they contend with gentrification, preferences over skin tone, racially insensitive colleagues and police brutality.

Donald Glover and Zazie Beetz in "Atlanta." Credit... Guy D'Alema/FX

But even those successes come with caveats. "Insecure," an HBO comedy about a 20-something trying to navigate love and her career in Los Angeles, came about after its creator, Issa Rae, broke through on YouTube, Professor Gooding said.

Mr. Cooper, the creator of "Bel-Air," used the same medium to get attention from the industry, Professor Gooding said.

"It's a damning referendum on how difficult it is to penetrate the Hollywood system," he said.

Ms. Summer, the "Different World" actress, says she still sees too many Black actors playing supporting parts, rather than leads. "I need a reflection of me," she said, "not the white girl's best friend."

"I can count on one hand the shows where we're the meat," Ms. Summer added. "That ain't cool. This is 2020. Get it together."

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What the 'Fresh Prince' of the '90s Tells Us About Race Now

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A generation ago, sitcoms with largely Black casts were must-see TV, balancing humor and drama. Will the "Bel-Air" reboot resonate in the era of Black Lives Matter? Two Black teenagers in a Mercedes-Benz are pulled over by the police. One, having grown up in West Philadelphia, has the wary look of someone who knows exactly how the situation will unfold.

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Last year, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights released a report that revealed shocking data about school discipline policies around the country. Nationally, black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, often starting at an early age. For instance, black children only represent 18% of preschool enrollment, but they represent 48% of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school. The uneven use of suspension and expulsion is mirrored across K-12.

What are the long-term effects of the overuse and misuse of disciplinary action? How much of a role does it play in the school-to-prison pipeline? Are there policy solutions at the local and federal level should be considered? Join New America in collaboration with Howard University for the third event in "From Moment to Movement," a conversation and essay series on race and policy in America.

Introduction:

Conor Williams
Senior Researcher, Education Policy Program, New America

Ja'Mesha Morgan
Student, Howard University

Participants:

Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad
Assistant Professor of Criminology, Howard University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of Arts & Sciences
Author, The Prison Alphabet: An Educational Coloring Book for Children of Incarcerated Parents

Ed N. Davies
Executive Director, DC Trust

Jose Vilson
Educator and Author, This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education

Thomas Mariadason
Staff Attorney, Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track Program, Advancement Project

Moderator:

Nikole Hannah-Jones
Journalist, The New York Times Magazine
Follow the discussion online using #Moment2Movement and by following @NewAmerica. This is the third event in the "From Moment to Movement" Series: Conversations on Race in America in collaboration with Howard University.

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The Criminalization of Black Youth in the Classroom

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Last year, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights released a report that revealed shocking data about school discipline policies around the country. Nationally, black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, often starting at an early age.

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The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for those who don't know, was a sitcom staple throughout the 1990s, considered by some a "golden era" of black television. But more than any other show, Fresh Prince helped shape how black characters on film and screen are represented.

The sitcom helped create a new black sociocultural movement by allowing its characters to run against the grain of social and cultural prejudices African Americans had for so long been subjected to. It also showed me that there was more to life than what I saw around me. That lessons had to be learned everyday, sometimes the hard way.

Starring actor Will Smith, and loosely based on his own life, Fresh Prince revolved around a streetwise, fatherless teen from Philadelphia who moves in with relatives in the upscale California community of Bel-Air.

Will's uncle Phil and aunt Vivian, and their children, Hilary, Carlton and Ashley are a family of class and wealth. At a time when most black television characters were either poor, from the streets, considered ghetto, or painted as criminals, the show really broke away from these stereotypical images.

Will constantly questioned his relatives' lack of "street" cred, the show's way of subverting the typical way that African Americans had been portrayed in mass media. Fresh Prince gave audiences a glimpse of the change that the American black community was experiencing at this period.

The show ran for six seasons and, although a comedy sitcom, it delved into a lot of personal issues that black families throughout the United States were facing. Topics ranging from school, family values, divorce, police brutality, racism, murder and even rape. The show truly tried to reach out to a younger generation of adults and teenagers; teaching morals and ethics that some may have not been taught in their homes.

It also provided viewers with a strong set of parents: Uncle Phil, a judge, and Aunt Vivian, a college professor, who like all parents wanted more for their children than they had growing up.

Their children were just as dynamic. Hilary, a scatterbrained shopping addict; Carlton, a political-minded conservative teen who wears sports coats and listens to Tom Jones in his off time; and Ashley, a bright young girl who's just as curious about life as any young pre teen. Together they helped Will realize that life is much bigger than the urban parts of West Philadelphia where he was born and raised.

It's a lesson I think we all learn at some point in our lives.

Fresh Prince offered an entertaining and optimistic outlook on a lot of situations that occurred throughout the 1990s - many very laughable and joyful, but some very dark. From Will driving home drunk and having a dream where he learns his lesson via ghosts, to the famous line where Will's friend Jazz - who is being asked to place his hand on the bible in court but refuses to put his hands down - says "No way. Dude's got a gun, next thing you know I got six warning shots in my back."

The show, through both the seriousness and humor, inspired people like me to set out for more in life regardless of what label society put on us or what it said we should or shouldn't do.

Constantly clashing with his family about how he believed they should be reacting to situations, or carrying themselves because they were black, Will demonstrated the diversity between life in the ghetto and life in the suburbs. All while shifting the mindset about how black characters on television had to act or think.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air can never be duplicated. In fact, Will Smith has said that, despite the rumors, he does not plan to produce a remake.

Which makes sense. The show was a one-of-a-kind. It touched the hearts of many young people at a point in time when things like police brutality, racism and inequality were prevalent, but not as candidly discussed as they are today.

Fresh Prince showed a generation of young people like myself that, no matter where you come from, where you've been and who you grew up with or without, there is and always will be opportunity and joy in life if you just work hard, love your friends and family, and trust and believe in yourself.

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How 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' Reached Out to a Generation In Need

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The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for those who don't know, was a sitcom staple throughout the 1990s, considered by some a "golden era" of black television. But more than any other show, Fresh Prince helped shape how black characters on film and screen are represented.

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A week and a half ago, I watched the Kony 2012 video. Afterward, I wrote a brief seven-part response, which I posted in sequence on my Twitter account:

These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They migrated beyond Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites; I'm told they generated fierce arguments. As the days went by, the tweets were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of The Atlantic and The New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend emailed to tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.

These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who'd reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as "resentment."

This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in The New York Times, in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof's approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.

More on the Lord's Resistance Army

Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone's feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

But there's a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the United States, there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the "angry black man." People of color, women, and gays-who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before-are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: Newspapers love to describe words or deeds as "racially charged" even in those cases when it would be more honest to say "racist"; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

It's only in the context of this neutered language that my rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof if he had heard of me. "Of course," he said. She asked him what he made of my criticisms. His answer was considered and genial, but what he said worried me more than an angry outburst would have:

There has been a real discomfort and backlash among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in particular in this case, but people more broadly, about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.

Here are some of the "middle-class educated Africans" Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered the Lord's Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012; Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a thorough riposte to the political wrong-headedness of Invisible Children; and Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof calls a "humanitarian disaster," and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it: militarization of poorer countries, short-sighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts over a wide and varied terrain.

I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a "wounded hippo." His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated "disasters." All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.

But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than "making a difference." There is the principle of "First do no harm." There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.

I write all this from multiple positions. I write as an African, a black man living in America. I am every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism. I also write this as an American, enjoying the many privileges that the American passport affords and that residence in this country makes possible. I involve myself in this critique of privilege: My own privileges of class, gender, and sexuality are insufficiently examined. My cellphone was likely manufactured by poorly treated workers in a Chinese factory. The coltan in the phone can probably be traced to the conflict-riven Democratic Republic of Congo. I don't fool myself that I am not implicated in these transnational networks of oppressive practices.

And I also write all this as a novelist and story-writer: I am sensitive to the power of narratives. When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blond toddler a photo of Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell's little boy would develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own. How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy; that their right to life is not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, "A singer may be innocent; never the song."
What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is a more equitable civil society, a more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice.
One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: A nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of "making a difference." To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist or a Mau Mau. It does give me away as an "educated middle-class African," and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other educated middle-class Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise, do: They assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)

In any case, Kristof and I are in profound agreement about one thing: There is much happening in many parts of the African continent that is not as it ought to be. I have been fortunate in life, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen or experienced African poverty firsthand. I grew up in a land of military coups and economically devastating, IMF-imposed "structural adjustment" programs. The genuine hurt of Africa is no fiction.

And we also agree on something else: that there is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor are they reducible to slogans. Such problems are both intricate and intensely local.

How, for example, could a well-meaning American "help" a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regard to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I've seen many) about how "we have to save them because they can't save themselves" can't change that fact.

Let me draw into this discussion an example from an African country I know very well. Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country's streets to protest the government's decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. This subsidy was widely seen as one of the few blessings of the country's otherwise catastrophic oil wealth. But what made these protests so heartening is that they were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the world and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. The protests went on for days, at considerable personal risk to the protesters. Several young people were shot dead, and the movement was eventually doused when union leaders capitulated and the army deployed on the streets. The movement did not "succeed" in conventional terms. But something important had changed in the political consciousness of the Nigerian populace. For me and for a number of people I know, the protests gave us an opportunity to be proud of Nigeria, many of us for the first time in our lives.

This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video about. After all, there is no simple demand to be made and-because corruption is endemic-no single villain to topple. There is certainly no " bridge character," Kristof's euphemism for white saviors in Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of Nigeria's protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right; they marched peacefully; they defended each other, and gave each other food and drink; Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed and vice versa; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of country that they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American 20-something heroes in sight.

Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda and he is no longer the threat he was, but he is a convenient villain for those who need a convenient villain. What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is a more equitable civil society, a more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice. This is the scaffolding from which infrastructure, security, health care, and education can be built. How do we encourage voices like those of the Nigerian masses who marched this January, or those who are engaged in the struggle to develop Ugandan democracy?

If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the U.S., and American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did not see fit to support the Nigeria protests. (Though the State Department issued a supportive statement-"our view on that is that the Nigerian people have the right to peaceful protest, we want to see them protest peacefully, and we're also urging the Nigerian security services to respect the right of popular protest and conduct themselves professionally in dealing with the strikes"-it reeked of boilerplate rhetoric and, unsurprisingly, nothing tangible came of it.) This was as expected; under the banner of "American interests," the oil comes first. Under that same banner, the livelihood of corn farmers in Mexico has been destroyed by NAFTA. Haitian rice farmers have suffered appalling losses due to Haiti being flooded with subsidized American rice. A nightmare has been playing out in Honduras in the past three years: An American-backed coup and American militarization of that country have contributed to a conflict in which hundreds of activists and journalists have already been murdered. The Egyptian military, which is now suppressing the country's once-hopeful movement for democracy and killing dozens of activists in the process, subsists on $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid. This is a litany that will be familiar to some. To others, it will be news. But, familiar or not, it has a bearing on our notions of innocence and our right to "help."

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don't always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world's deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not least of them being that Museveni appears to be a U.S. proxy in its shadowy battles against militants in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?

All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent; never the song.

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If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

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THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR: Season 1 (1990-91) Clip (Will & Carlton Get Out Of Jail)

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How many times have you heard someone say that they "don't see color," "are color-blind," or "don't have a racist bone in their body?" Maybe you've even said this yourself. After all, the dominant language around racial issues today is typically one of color blindness, as it's often meant to convey distaste for racial practices and attitudes common in an earlier era.

Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of color blindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of color blindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.

For the first half of the 20th century, it was perfectly legal to deny blacks (and other racial minorities) access to housing, jobs, voting, and other rights based explicitly on race. Civil-rights reforms rendered these practices illegal. Laws now bar practices that previously maintained racial inequality, such as redlining, segregation, or openly refusing to rent or sell real estate to black Americans. Yet discrimination still persists, operating through a combination of social, economic, and institutional practices.

Concurrently, it is no longer socially acceptable in many quarters to identify oneself as racist. Instead, many Americans purport not to see color. However, their color blindness comes at a cost. By claiming that they do not see race, they also can avert their eyes from the ways in which well-meaning people engage in practices that reproduce neighborhood and school segregation, rely on " soft skills" in ways that disadvantage racial minorities in the job market, and hoard opportunities in ways that reserve access to better jobs for white peers.

The Atlantic 's Conor Friedersdorf recently argued that the academic left errs in attacking color blindness. He suggested that encouraging whites to be color conscious and to think of themselves in racial terms would encourage the nativism embraced by some Donald Trump supporters-that a heightened awareness of whiteness would produce a sense of persecution, and encourage some to rally in defense of white rights. He contends that there is some merit to color blindness that has been ignored by what he describes as "the academic left," which spends too much time focused on nitpicking color blindness rather than drawing attention to "macroaggressions" such as "racially tinged hatred and conspiracy theories directed at the first black president" or the convenience of labeling Mexican immigrants rapists "despite the fact that first-generation immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born Americans."

As a presumptive member of the academic left that Friedersdorf critiques, I read the post with particular interest. I think that Friedersdorf makes some important points worth more detailed attention from both academics and those outside the academy who are familiar with the debates and concepts he references. For instance, academic debates can often become divorced from broader audiences. It is way too easy for academics in many fields to ground their conversations, disputes, and discussions among other like-minded scholars. He's right to note that, by and large, academics can do a much better job engaging with folks outside of our ivory towers.

However, there are some misrepresentations in Fridersdorf's piece as well. Based on a single statement from one book chapter in an edited volume, Friedersdorf makes the sweeping generalization that "the academic left casts all proponents of colorblindness as naïve." I've read books and articles by numerous sociologists who critique the color-blind ideology, and while they find problems with the ways this perspective allows individuals to ignore patterns of racial bias, I've never seen any studies that broadly categorize advocates of color blindness in this way. What's more important to sociologists are the consequences of how this ideology has implications for social inequality.

My colleague Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, for example, has written extensively about the idea of color blindness, charting the ways that it functions as an ideology that legitimizes specific practices that maintain racial inequalities-police brutality, housing discrimination, voter disenfranchisement, and others. His book Racism Without Racists is part of a broad set of sociological research that draws attention to the ways that colorblind ideology undergirds bigger, more problematic social issues.
There are more than a few members of the academic left who argue that color blindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing social problems.
Yet, in addition to suggesting that the academic left casts all proponents of color blindness as naïve, Friedersdorf also contends that they waste time picking apart this concept rather than addressing "macroagressions" such as police brutality and growing expressions of virulent racist hatred. But Bonilla-Silva, among others, describes the ways that color blindness sustains these very macroaggressions that Friedersdorf thinks are ignored. In other words, Friedersdorf suggests the academic left wastes time dissecting the concept of color blindness, and would be better served focusing on more pressing, systemic processes of inequality. But a careful read of sociological literature in this area finds that there are more than a few members of the academic left who argue that color blindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing these exact social problems. Other sociologists such as Jessie Daniels and David Cort focus explicitly on researching hate speech on the internet and the lower rates of crime among immigrants relative to native-born Americans, respectively-the very issues that Friedersdorf, by his own admission, charges are important and believes are overlooked by the academic left. Sociologists are actually very involved in highlighting these macroaggressions-and in underscoring the ways color-blind ideology allows them to go ignored.

Advocates of color blindness, like Friedersdorf, tend to claim that emphasizing whites' group identity as whites (rather than as individuals) is counterproductive. Rejecting color blindness and encouraging whites to see themselves as members of a distinct racial group, they argue, will produce nativism. They will cling to, rather than critique, the privileges that whiteness affords, which are jeopardized by a more multiracial society. Friedersdorf calls it naïve to believe that upon focusing on their status as members of a racial group and the privilege and power that affords them, "masses of white people will identify more strongly with their racial tribe and then sacrifice the interests of that tribe."

This is, in the abstract, a compelling point. The trouble is that the weight of the scholarly evidence directly contradicts this argument. Sociologists such as Karyn McKinney, Eileen O'Brien, Joe Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Matthew Hughey, who have studied the pathways and trajectories by which whites become involved in anti-racist activism, show that contrary to Friedersdorf's beliefs, moving away from color blindness can actually serve as a pathway toward anti-racism. In many of these studies, as whites came to understand themselves as members of a racial group that enjoyed unearned privileges and benefits, this compelled them to forge a different sense of white identity built on anti-racism rather than simply supporting the status quo. Moving away from the color-blind ideology that sociologists critique-the idea that it's admirable to profess not to see color, that it's problematic to see oneself as a member of a racial group-is, according to the research in this area, actually an important step to anti-racist activism.
In most social interactions, whites get to be seen as individuals. Racial minorities become aware from a young age that people will often judge them as members of their group.
There's a strong emphasis on individualism in American culture. Friedersdorf argues that "race is a pernicious concept that robs people of their individuality ... the academic left also underestimates how divisive it can be to put anything other than individualism at the center of identity." But ironically, this focus on individualism is itself a function of group position. Whites, by and large, enjoy the luxury of promoting the importance of the individual, because they benefit from living in a racially stratified society where whiteness is normalized. In most social interactions, whites get to be seen as individuals. Racial minorities, by contrast, become aware from a young age that people will often judge them as members of their group, and treat them in accordance with the (usually negative) stereotypes attached to that group.

Everyone wants to be treated as an individual and recognized for their personal traits and characteristics. But the color blindness that sociologists critique doesn't allow for this. Instead, it encourages those who endorse this perspective to ignore the ongoing processes that maintain racial stratification in schools, neighborhoods, health care, and other social institutions. Can color consciousness draw attention to these issues? The research demonstrates that it can lead to more understanding of our racially stratified society and can give rise to a willingness to work for change. So from that perspective, it doesn't seem worth abandoning just yet.

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white peers.the atlantic’s conor friedersdorf

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part of a broad set of sociological research

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If You Don't See Race, How Can You See Racial Inequality?

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How many times have you heard someone say that they "don't see color," "are color-blind," or "don't have a racist bone in their body?" Maybe you've even said this yourself. After all, the dominant language around racial issues today is typically one of color blindness, as it's often meant to convey distaste for racial practices and attitudes common in an earlier era.

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Finding My Identity Via ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’

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The ’90s American sitcom was crucial in helping me understand blackness as a young girl of Nigerian descent growing up in Scotland.