The Fresh Prince of Subversion
When put on paper, conceptually, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air should have been as unmitigated disaster. The show was created by a 32-year-old white male named Andy Borowitz. It featured a character that, essentially, was an amalgamation of tropes regarding poor, young black males. Will Smith, the titular Fresh Prince, loved rap and hip-hop. In the show, he speaks nearly entirely in slang. In any scene, he stands out with his flashy, over-the-top clothes. Basketball is his favorite sport, of course. The show deals with his lack of a father figure, and throughout the show he butts heads with adults, showing his issues with authority. Will is in equal parts a pitiable figure and a buffoon meant to be laughed at.
That said, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air manages to avoid the pitfalls of a series that becomes a racial stereotyping of black people. Instead, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air succeeds because Will Smith, who could have been a venerable charity-case in a “very special episode” expanded into a full series, instead comes across as a character with humanity. Will Smith — the actor — uses his charisma to position Will Smith — the character — as an audience surrogate. Someone to empathize with. This contrast leads to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air becoming one of the most progressive and direct TV shows of the 90s. One could argue that it continues to outplay modern television in both categories as well.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air transcends its potential offensiveness towards African-American parties by examining two aspects of Black culture: wealth, as well as race. One episode in the show tackles both issue simultaneously. In it, Uncle Phil and Aunt Vivian, Will Smith’s caretakers, find themselves getting back in touch with a friend named Marge from their days protesting during the Civil Rights Movement. Will and Marge quickly connect due to their similar stances on authority, causing Will to lock himself into a room at his school, as he is protesting their stance on firing one of their nonconformist teachers. Uncle Phil and Aunt Vivian confront Marge for influencing their son, with Marge retaliating by saying that the two have forgotten the struggle of African Americans against white supremacy due to their new, wealthy lifestyles.
This clash represents The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s unique takes on wealth and the African-American experience. It does so by choosing to represent Will and Marge’s more radical takes on African-American counterculture, while also presenting Uncle Phil and Aunt Vivian’s new form of protest against the white establishment. Marge mentions chains and hoses, while Uncle Phil speaks on how he “fights his battles behind a desk.” Whether one takes more of a side with Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv or Marge and Will is irrelevant. What is important is that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had the forethought to allow viewers to weigh both options, without obscuring one or the other. Though Will and Uncle Phil’s values clash, the show gives two different perspectives of African-Americans, giving the show’s viewers a third dimension towards race that was rarely seen on television at the time.
Besides this, this difference in perspectives about wealth allowed the shows’ viewers to be engaged, rather than shying away from its material. The Banks did not fit the bill of the average African-American’s wealth in the 90s. Whereas The Cosby Show’s Huxtables — which was on the tail end of its run at the time — were wealthy, the Banks were extremely rich, at a level the average viewer would most certainly find unrelatable. This astronomical difference in wealth makes Will Smith a relatable character to the average audience, which was white at the time. Will’s ’hood upbringing clashes with the Banks’ luxurious lifestyle, meaning that white audiences connected with this aspect of his character more than his slang and hip-hop would turn them away. As a result, Will isn’t “threatening” to white audiences. Even though Will is the one meant to be brash and “invading” in the Banks’ lives, the show more often pokes fun at the stuffiness and pretentiousness of Uncle Phil, Carlton, and the rest.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air also examines race separate from Will, but still with a perspective nuanced and varied enough for both black and white audiences to be satisfied. One episode that emphasizes this takes place when Will and Carlton are pulled over for driving a nice car. They are arrested for being suspected of car-jacking. Though Uncle Phil eventually helps them get released due to his status as a lawyer, Will and Carlton clash due to their different perspectives on how the situation played out. Carlton believes “[the system of police governance] works,” while Will believes that the system is flawed. He mentions that Carlton’s “fancy Bel-Air address and who [his] daddy is” does not matter. This is because as long as he is black, Will believes that the system of police governance will always focus on incarcerating African-Americans.
These issues of identity occur in other episodes of the series as well — Uncle Phil confronts his past as a poor African-American on his way to becoming an up-and-coming judge. Carlton code-switches to fit in while in Compton. Aunt Vivian is upset that her sister is marrying a white man. All these episodes, along with others, examined various aspects of race from a class-based and racially-biased perspective, as opposed to one or the other, exclusively.
While this could be considered typical for “Black Television,” considering shows like The Cosby Show and Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air takes a different tact. It was interested in a different brand of “respectability politics” than those other shows. Where Bill Cosby was focused on “pulling your pants up,” so to speak, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was a show that let Will Smith hang his pants low and listen to rap and use slang, while still espousing family values like any other after-school-special-style family sitcom. William Maxwell describes it thusly:
[Fresh Prince] transforms the figure of the rapper from a disrespectful antagonist to a conciliatory figure, a kind of streetwise instructor of African-American history who hopes to remedy contemporary black liberalism’s bourgeois blues with remembrance of a less comfortable but more heroic past. Will works to restore black consensus, mediating a generational difference that is thought of in class and regional as well as Oedipal terms.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air differentiated itself from other shows like it, making it special in the realm of 90s African-American television. It did this by allowing for multiple different perspectives on Blackness and what it means to be Black via wealth-disparity, the racial divide, and discussion on topics such as apartheid and the struggle between ’60s / ’70s era protest movements vs. establishment black liberalism. It was also “sanitary” enough for family television. It gave audiences a key protagonist in Will Smith, who “vacillated between different iterations of race and class identities without ever losing his humanity.”
