Dexter, a Showtime series is hands down one of my favorite shows ever. It is a show about a average guy, who is a blood analyst for the Miami Metro police…by day, but by night he is a serial killer. Right of the bat, I was intrigued by the mere premise. However, this show does an interesting job of not only showing Dexter as a nice person, but also showing a haunting side, a killer side, but the writing makes the audience love him. Whenever Dexter thinks to kill, actually kills, even hits someone, I tend to feel some sort of jolt of (for lack of better words) BADASSNESS.
Here is a short trailer to get you semi-familiar with what I am talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6_qsTCBns8
I am consistently intrigued by his ability to become someone new, and his appeal of being bad, but good all at the same time. However, I tend to think about if I would think this way if Michael C. Hall were Black. Would my perceptions of Dexter be the same? I think not. I think this relates to our identification process in America. We are processed identify a white male as a person who is well Dexter by Day, so the derivation of that is exciting and new. However we are also processed to identify a black man as scary and aggressive. There would be no way a black man could play this role, even if he was as good of an actor as Michael C. Hall, because our ideals of America would reject that concept. We are still processing the idea that black men have lead roles, and we are definitely are not ready for them to play roles that would actually use that scariness we already have ingrained, and make it lovable. A black lovable serial killer? Yeah right.
P.S. The show killed off its only black person of the entire series in the second season. It just finished it’s fourth season, no black people.
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