Carlton Banks Was More Than Just a Dance

By Julian KimbleSept. 10, 2020, 4:03 pm UTC • 9 min

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s pilot episode may have opened with a young Will Smith banging on his wealthy relatives’ front door to the rhythm of Soul ll Soul’s “Back to Life,” but the show truly began when he was reintroduced to his cousin Carlton Banks. Their differences were best illustrated by their respective styles: Will’s striped neon shirt, Air Jordan 5s, and hat cocked at a goofy angle stood in stark contrast to the pink sweater draped over Carlton’s shoulders, his plaid shorts, and his boat shoes. In Will’s eyes, Carlton personified his new environment—when he looked in the mirror and imagined himself dressed as his cousin, his reflection screamed in horror. “I thought that had to be Will’s biggest nightmare, at least when first arriving in Bel-Air,” says writer and satirist Andy Borowitz, who created the show with writer and producer Susan Borowitz, who he was married to at the time. “So that was the inspiration: ‘What is the anti-Will?’”

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which premiered on NBC 30 years ago on Thursday, was Carlton’s story as much as it was Will’s. His life was altered by Will’s presence just as much as being thrust into the upper class changed Will’s. It’s easy to paint Will as objectively “cooler” than Carlton, but their dynamic isn’t that simple to describe. Carlton was an elitist Black Republican who believed capitalism and following a very narrow path of respectability would lead him to everything he wanted in life. He was frequently the subject of Will’s ridicule, but he was equally antagonistic: Perceived mental superiority and a condescending tone were his weapons of choice. Flaws considered, Carlton had layers that prevented him from being a one-dimensional snob. His insecurities humanized him. Part of the reason Carlton was so singularly focused on success was because he felt immense pressure to live up to the standard his high-achieving parents set. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air explored the connection between race and class in America that factored heavily into Carlton’s identity. And the older he got, the more he was forced to reckon with his identity in relation to his privilege. All of the above made for an intriguing character.

There’s a reason Carlton Banks stands out after 30 years, aside from being responsible for a dance so iconic that it was recently at the center of a lawsuit against Fortnite. The tension between Carlton and Will was the tension at the heart of the show. Carlton was the more complex character because he wasn’t as easy to digest or categorize. But even if you disagreed with his politics or wanted to slap the haughtiness out of him, you were able to empathize with him. Love Carlton Banks or hate him, he was genuine.

Carlton, like his siblings, was very loosely based on Quincy Jones’s children. The legendary musician, composer, and producer was an executive producer for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and wanted to depict a Black family that was a notch above the Cosbys, financially. “The Cosbys were affluent, but the Bankses were wealthy,” Jones told Time in 2015. His kids, who grew up wealthy, were part of the foundation for the Banks kids’ experiences. But in terms of name and aesthetic, Carlton was inspired by Andy and Susan Borowitz’s former Harvard University classmate Carlton Cuse, who’s best known as an executive producer and showrunner of Lost. “Let’s say, named after,” Cuse told Borowitz of the connection during a 2014 conversation. The Cuse they met fit the preppy archetype Borowitz had in mind because he was into activities like rowing and had what Borowitz considered to be a classic preppy name. “And so that was the thought I had,” Borowitz says of Carlton’s origin. “‘Let’s come up with the preppiest kid.’”

The risk in making Carlton such a dramatic foil to Will was the possibility of not being taken seriously. Screenwriter and producer Rob Edwards, who served as a staff writer and story editor during The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s first season, was instrumental in making sure Carlton wasn’t merely a walking punch line. “My fear was they were gonna play Carlton—that he was gonna wind up like [Steve] Urkel,” he says. Edwards understood that Carlton being stronger made Will stronger, so he used his own experience as a Black kid going to a predominantly white prep school to inform both of their experiences at Bel-Air Academy. He also did his best to make sure Carlton didn’t come off as weak.

“The way I always saw it was both Will and Carlton absolutely know that they’re right,” Edwards says. “Carlton knows that Will is going to be working for him some day and Will knows that Carlton is eventually gonna get beat up in an alley because he just has no cool to him. And those arguments were the most fun to write because Will would hammer Carlton on his Blackness and Carlton would hammer Will in return on his grammar. That was his ‘You couldn’t survive in my world’ kind of thing.”

Carlton was a reflection of the ivory towers he was exposed to, but he was cool in that world. Will was the first person to challenge him in that regard, usually by targeting Carlton’s Blackness—especially during the early seasons. The initial conflict between the two of them was motivated by their inability to relate to each other based on their vastly different upbringings and interests. Their relationship showcased different Black experiences, a reality, as absurd as it sounds, that mainstream America was still largely unaware of by the early 1990s. “There was a sense of this monolith of a Black experience, that there was one kind of Black American, and they all think alike and do the same thing,” Susan Borowitz told Time in 2015. “We liked the idea of challenging that.”

But Carlton stood his ground. In the first-season episode “72 Hours,” Will bet Carlton that he wouldn’t last two days in Compton—an indirect way of saying the sheltered Carlton couldn’t survive in his world. However, Carlton fit in by doing an exaggerated impression of Will and impressing Jazz’s (Jeff Townes) friends with his financial acumen. “A smart guy—and I know a million of these guys; they’re lawyers, doctors, or scientists—can survive in Will’s world because everybody wants to make money,” says Edwards, who wrote the episode. Beyond learning how far Carlton will go to win, Will gained more insight into who his cousin was. “The upshot of it is Will realizes that Carlton’s behavior, demeanor, style—it’s all a choice,” Borowitz says. “It’s something he believes in and it’s just as justifiable and valid as Will’s choice.”

Carlton’s comfort with himself rubbed some people the wrong way. It was one thing that his cousin—who loved him, all jokes aside—made fun of him. It was something else entirely when he was being humiliated by an outsider out of spite. In “Blood Is Thicker Than Mud,” from the show’s fourth season, Will and Carlton pledged to join the fictional Black fraternity Phi Beta Gamma. Carlton was hazed worse than his fellow pledges and ultimately denied entry to the organization because Top Dog (Glenn Plummer) took offense to pretty much everything about him. “I’m not accepting no prep-school, Bel-Air-bred sellout into my fraternity,” he told Carlton. In his eyes, Carlton didn’t reflect Phi Beta Gamma’s values because of his background. “He saw Carlton as a guy who escaped the reality of being Black,” says producer and screenwriter Devon Shepard, who wrote the episode.

Shepard admits that Top Dog represented how he initially viewed Carlton Banks and Alfonso Ribeiro before he understood the character and accepted him for who he was. (Ribeiro declined to be interviewed for this piece through his publicist.) “He never tried to be anything other than who he was,” Shepard says. Top Dog’s issue with Carlton highlighted the class conflict within the Black community that’s intensified over the past 50 years. His resentment of Carlton was class resentment directed upward. “It was definitely a class issue that spilled over into a race issue,” Shepard says. “Even the speech I wrote for Carlton—‘Why do you think I’m not Black enough?’—is answering that question.” “Being Black isn’t what I’m trying to be,” Carlton told Top Dog. “It’s what I am.”

It was important that Carlton not only stand up for himself, but understand how he was perceived by the world beyond his bubble of privilege. Perhaps the only thing close to a universal Black experience is being treated with disdain by the world at large. That’s a reality the wealthy can’t earn their way out of. In “Mistaken Identity,” from the first season, he and Will were arrested while driving a Mercedes-Benz to Palm Springs as a favor. Will was well aware of how Black people’s interactions with police can play out; Carlton was completely ignorant. The only reason they were freed from jail was because Uncle Phil (James Avery) was a powerful lawyer at the time. In the end, Carlton’s first brush with systemic racism left him questioning his worldview. “You see in him this tremendous struggle of trying to reconcile the world that he’s grown up in and the world that he’s going to face,” Borowitz says. “The downside of Carlton being who he was is that it ingrained a set of beliefs—a faith in law enforcement—that is dangerous,” Edwards says.

The strongest test of Carlton’s faith in systems occured when Will took a bullet for him. The two were robbed at gunpoint during Season 5’s “Bullets Over Bel-Air” and the traumatic experience forced Carlton to face his own mortality and feelings of powerlessness. The system he grew up believing in couldn’t protect him. “I’m all grown up now, Dad,” he told Uncle Phil, now a judge. “Don’t tell me any more fairy tales.” Soon after, Will—still confined to a hospital bed—had to berate Carlton into handing over the gun he had tucked into his chinos for “protection.” Even though he left the gun on the hospital bed with Will, Carlton still left that hospital a different person: a capitalist aware that money could shield him from only so much.

Carlton’s identity was shaped by his quest to live up to his parents’ Black elite ideals—particularly his father’s. In the pilot episode, when Carlton saw the Malcolm X poster on Will’s wall, he remarked that he was a great man, but wasn’t one of his heroes. His biggest hero was Uncle Phil. All of the Banks children were, in one way or another, reflections of their upbringing. Carlton bought into the notion that assimilation was required to “make it.” He was extremely committed to his parents’ vision and felt he had to eclipse their success. Neither his father nor his mother (Janet Hubert, then Daphne Reid), a high school dropout who became a respected college professor, grew up with a modicum of privilege. They gave their children everything they didn’t have, even if “the best” wasn’t the best thing for them. Carlton didn’t want to accomplish less with more resources available to him and would do anything to prevent that.

“He never questions whether these are goals worth striving for,” Borowitz says. “He’s determined to be a credit to his father and his family in a very conventional way that his parents set out for him.”

That’s why Carlton was rattled whenever things didn’t go according to his inflexible plan for advancement. His moments of self-doubt usually involved being outshined by Will, to some degree. This offset his arrogance, which made him a more fascinating character. It’s what made him steal the ball from Will and launch that pathetic, game-losing heave during the first season. It’s what made him cheat off of Will out of jealousy and desperation after he scored one point lower on the PSATs. And it’s what made him lie about being accepted to Princeton—his father’s alma mater—after Will was conditionally accepted. A large share of his self-esteem was tied to achievement, so he didn’t know how to act when he wasn’t on top. Beneath his smug confidence, Carlton was vulnerable and eager for his father’s approval.

Carlton’s exceptionalism subsided when he was forced to deviate from his plan. Being denied by Princeton was one of the best things that happened to him. The more time he spent around Will, the more his outlook evolved. By the time he transferred to Princeton at the end of the series, he realized it didn’t define who he was—even though it was what he always wanted. Although Carlton was still prone to social climbing, he grew substantially while remaining true to who he was: a young Black conservative who loved Tom Jones and money, but not anywhere near as much as he loved his family. For all of his objectionable qualities, Carlton Banks was authentic.

“Hopefully you don’t see Carlton and think he’s somebody you don’t want to be entirely,” Edwards says. “Hopefully you see him and you say, ‘OK, I get that guy.’”

Julian Kimble has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Undefeated, GQ, Billboard, Pitchfork, The Fader, SB Nation, and many more.

Julian Kimble

Carlton Banks Was More Than Just a Dance

Carlton Banks Was More Than Just a Dance

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