What attracted me to The Fresh Prince was its humor and the way the show presented a multiplicity of black narratives that were relatable to me and other viewers that identified as black. Later, in my teens, the show would serve as a gateway into better understanding and appreciating my own blackness.
At that moment, it almost felt destined that I should stumble upon The Fresh Prince. She told me that it was my eldest brother’s favorite show and that I was named Jeffrey after the British butler, Geoffrey, Patrick’s favorite character. My mother walked in and started laughing because she recognized the TV series. I recall one afternoon, flipping through the channels searching for something to watch and falling upon The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Cameroon was my roots – it was what made me the individual that I am – being African-American meant constructing a black identity that would allow me to be accepted in the African-American neighborhoods I inhabited. As I grew older, I kept trying to bridge the gap between my two black identities, African and African-American. At the time, I couldn’t understand why they taunted and isolated me from my 5-year-old perspective we were all black and it was that blackness that drew us together, despite our various ethnic backgrounds. Every day I was confronted with harsh name-calling by black boys and girls of the same age, at school and in our neighborhood, because of my black African identity. When my mother and I arrived in 1999, we settled in a predominantly African-American community in North Minneapolis. –Darnell Hunt īorn in Cameroon and then emigrating to the United States at the age of five, I’ve grown up confused about my African-American identity. culture, one dependent upon an institutionalized complex of prototypical signifiers: the African’s dark skin his coarse and curly hair her earthy and unrestrained culture his brute physicality. Blackness has always played a fundamental role in U.S.
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