It took a while to get used to. Here was a black leading man, very handsome, outrageously suave in a downright Cary Grant/James Bond kind of way who led a band of con artists performing elaborate grifts on the deservingly greedy. The white female lead was obviously in love with him; he obviously knew it, and would obviously have satisfied her had his station as group leader not prevented it. There was no mention of his race. There was no dramatic “reason” for him to be black. He simply was.

Then, in another show, there was this black man in charge of an outrageously powerful, well-funded effort to capture a valuable individual. The black man was, in every conceivable way, a righteous bastard. He hadn’t a single redeeming attribute. He once placed a small child in a public zoo lion’s cage in order to achieve his ends. Nobody liked him. Again, he simply was black. Not half-black, not kinda sorta… Just black, and a bastard.

And it happened a couple of more times: In one show, a black man had an unrequited crush on a white co-worker. In another, the young black supporting player was again in love with the white female lead; he was a bit of a bumbler, and didn’t have the stones to join her on her intergalactic travels, but for all that, he appeared simply human, not weak. In neither case was there a scintilla of the “black man chasing white women” stereotype.

One other thing about all of these shows: they were either British or British-bred.

As a Netflix devotee, I watch a lot of British drama, and one is struck blind by how differently black men are treated within them. We can be assholes, strong, suave, sexy, weak, sleazy, upper-class, working-class, effortless leaders, clueless followers. We can participate fully in the mainstream of whatever world we happen to be part of. We’re not relegated to cardboard second banana status as we are in American procedurals, nor to cardboard symbolic nobility as we are just about everywhere else (even Presidential races).

We don’t have to have a “reason” to exist within the world of the British TV show as we do on American television. The shows are not perpetually trumpeting our presence as their nod to “diversity” or their own progressiveness. Nor are we relegated to all-black worlds; we are allowed to interact with and play principal parts in the world at large. It’s the difference between a society that still suffers from just plain racism (the probably innate tendency toward prejudice against those who don’t look like you) and a society like ours, still stifled by a history of chattel slavery, in which blacks were not just different— but officially brutalized as subhuman.

On the British-based-and-bred Canadian series Hustle, Adrian Lester played Mickey Stone, a legendary genius of the elaborate “long con” who ran his own London “crew.” Here Lester played a character whose reputation and livelihood depended upon his ability to weave in and out of any social situation— from the most highfalutin’ upper-crust auction crowd to the night shift janitorial staff. This was a character with a mastery of the world in which he lived. It was a black male character unlike any I’d seen on American television.

In the Brit mini-series Jekyll, Paterson Joseph fakes an American accent to play Benjamin, the epitome of the barbarous “corporate man.” The only way black American TV actors are allowed to be this vicious if they’re drug dealers— and even then they’re “humanized” within an inch of their lives. Rarely would one get a chance at this kind of over-the-top grand guignol malevolence. Not to mention that this black man truly exercised life and death control over white ones. Might make the American audience a wee bit uncomfortable.

Our roles on American TV are usually token or political. Dennis Haysbert’s black President on 24 was as much a political statement as he was a character (as are just about all the characters on 24). The Wire’s excellent roles for black actors stem from the show’s social realism and extraordinary socio-political context. Many shows host a single black person (comedies, procedurals) simply to acknowledge the existence of non-whites and cover their asses. And then there are shows with principally black casts that, for better or worse, effectively divorce us from the bulk of American society.

We don’t get to express the full range of dramatic types because Americans, like all people, are victims of our history. And historically, American blacks have been seen less as people, and more as issues. To portray an issue, you must walk on eggshells in order not to offend one side or the other. You limit your expression when doing so. Watching Brit TV, you sometimes get to exhale and see yourself portrayed as a full-blooded, fully-functional human being. It’s contrast to American TV is proof that the term “post-racial” is no more than the mainstream’s self-aggrandizing crock.

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Leonce Gaiter’s work on social and cultural issues has appeared in numerous publications, from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times magazine. His noir novel “Bourbon Street” was published by Carroll & Graf.

Tags: adrian lester, black actors, hustle, jeckyll, paterson joseph, post racial