Racial Negotiation in the TV Show Being Human

Spoilers ahead...maybe.

I watched the first two episodes of Being Human.

In a story very similar to the Will Smith version of I, Robot, a detective is investigating a crime organization that took out his partner and other law enforcement of the LAPD while at the same time battling his dislike of his mandated partner android.

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Familiarity aside, I'd like to focus on the juggling of characterization that seems to be going on here (though I may be wrong in my conclusions). Detective Kennex doesn't like androids. He doesn't trust them and doesn't want to work with them. They show his dislike when he returns to the force after a stint of rehabilitation. His superior informs him that he has to have a partner who is an android (and here we learn that he might have learned his prejudice from his father?). They don't get along, the android gets invasive, and Kennex shoves him out of a moving car.

Okay, so he gets a new partner android--Dorian--that's one of the older model not used any more because of their overemotional tendencies. Dorian's played by a black actor, though of course, an android wouldn't have a race or ethnicity. I think the writers, however, were aware of the implications of the white detective having a prejudice against what is, for all intents and purposes, is a black man. This is particularly dicey when Kennex uses a 'slur' against his partner--'synthetic.'

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So how do the writers show us that this prejudice is specifically against androids and not against black people? Well, one they make his first android partner a 'Caucasian' model so that when the detective disposes of him, we see that he definitely has problems with all robots, not specific ones.

Second, they make his girlfriend a woman of ambiguous ethnicity (though she looks black). So this pushes him over the edge from just tolerating other ethnicities to having absolutely no problems with race.

So why did they make the black woman a villain? Why go through all that trouble

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of letting us know that Kennex isn't a racist while at the same time making the black woman behind all the bad things that has happened in his life? On top of this, there's the issue of another detective on the force that Kennex is interested in. She's not black...

On the other hand, the second episode has android sex companions...and Kennex does not seem averse to them (a prominently shown one has the appearance of being of black descent). I guess that means it's only in the law enforcement role that he has a problem with androids.

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Yet this is mainly on the surface. I have no idea what the ex-girlfriend's true role will be in the show. She might not even be the villain; it just appears like this as of the first episode (the story had nothing to do with the Syndicate in the second episode, though I also noticed that Kennex's description of his ideal woman left out eye color). Shoudl I get into the whole 'crazy' black guy paired with the anal-retentive white guy? Maybe not. I just thought that how writers chose to deal with race nowadays was interesting and complicated...and sometimes convoluted.