Fresh Prince of Bel-Air- Gangsta Carlton

Cultural Text:
The Bet



Gangsta Transformation



Who won the bet?



Analysis:
My cultural product is non-binartistic in realms of race and gender. The realms of race and gender intersect also with the concept of class in my product, with race as the subordinate subject, and using class as a dominant subject position. Gender also plays a huge role within the concept of what a certain gender should act like within a certain race. Class can trump authenticity of race because people racialize class. Upper-class doesn’t have the same experiences as lower class, therefore if one comes from another class than the majority of their race, can be seen as less than, or not belonging to a race. My argument is that money equals whiteness, and through my clip of Fresh Prince I will show how these realms intersect through diversity within pan-ethnicity, racial formation and intersectionality. The first observation of my product is what does it mean to be black? I want to discuss what society defines as being more socially black and why this has come to be. According to Omi and Winant, they describe race as something that is a very real, a classification that has both cultural ramifications as well as enforces a definite social order (54-55). So knowing this we know that the race definitely does have an order of organization to it. Carlton and Will show the diversity of blackness within pan-ethnicity. Here we are watching two individuals trying to prove that one is more “black” than the other. One explanation of where this notion of thought about blackness comes from is in Yen Le Espritu’s article, “Beyond Dualisms.” Espritu talks about how societies organize themselves around binaries, and these binaries help to organize structure and power. “Thus, white/male/professional/citizen constitutes the norm against which black/female/laborer/ alien is defined (108).” This helps to understand how Carlton is going against the group that society has placed him in. This goes further into when Espritu is discussing how Asians are neither/nor and both/and, this relates to Carlton completely. Although the majority of people Carlton associates with are white, he still is not accepted by them as being white, despite some of the mutual characteristics and rearing that has taken place. The same goes with blacks, when they see Carlton they think he is trying to act white, so they feel he is not embracing his blackness, therefore they don’t count him as being black. Carlton creates this almost “third space” discussed, for himself, because he doesn’t quite fit into either category (Espritu, 108). Later in this clip we see Carlton go through an image formation. When he takes off his stiff blazer and sweater vests and trades them in for a bandana, baggie pants and a gold chain. He talks with street slang, and had a swagger to his walk. When Carlton first arrived to Jazz’s apartment he said things like, “ oh just give me time to acclimate myself” and in response to that sentence one of Jazz’s friends replies, “Acclimate, that sounds like a school word, I don’t like school words.” Then later we see Carlton using terms such as, “sup” and “homies.” Along with this new slang, the others give Carlton the new name of C-Note, and Carlton embraces this new identity. In this clip we can see Omi and Winant’s theory of racialization occurring. Racialization the process of racial formation means an ideological and historically specific project where racial ideology comes from pre-existing conceptual elements. The end of this clip is a scene between Carlton and Will and they are both trying to figure out who won the bet. Carlton states to Will, “You always act like I never measure up to some rule of blackness you carry around.” This quote relates to the theory of fussion and fission in panethnicty. Because although Will and Carlton are both lumped as black, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a discrepancy between the two, as well as a bond. In the end both Carlton and Will feel judge by each other, and Will feels that because Carlton is of upper-class that he looks down on Will and thinks he is less intelligent. While Carlton feels less black. This ending conversation perfectly concludes that even within the same race there is still the division of class and race, and that from both ends of the spectrum, all feel that money trumps authenticity of blackness.