What was shocking to me as I began researching was the plethora of information available on issues of race and cyborgs, but a lack of information on race and Androids.  Though my first instinct made me question if they were interesting, given the lack of scholarship.  However, once I gave it a bit more thought, I determined that perhaps they are seen as too far from being human to even be considered in terms of an analysis of the human condition and human relationships.  Instead, they can only be described in terms of what they can do for the human.  They have no real agency despite their humanoid form.  What was striking to me about these androids is that, due to their human appearance, they were most often relegated to roles of manual and menial labor, roles that traditionally in American society would be filled by black faces.  Much like film in general has moved away from these depictions of black faces (The Help notwithstanding), it seems that culturally we have shifted from images of humans with their android helpers.  A general trend that appear after 1980 and continues to be explored today is highlighting the being-in-flux, the cyborg, and its navigation of being human and not human at the same time.

The idea of androids marking a cultural space traditionally occupied by black faces has not been explored in depth.  Though not explored, it has been acknowledge in popular technology culture. One such cultural remnant appeared on Gizmodo in 2010.  A brief article entitled True Love Doesn’t Rust  featured a parody book cover poster and a link to buy it.  It featured Rosey the Robot from the Jetsons and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. The text of the article started with the following, “True Love Doesn’t RustHim: a warrior-slave from a forbidden planet. Her: a servant girl from a decent upper-middle class space home. And while their parts may break down from time to time, their love is eternal”.  In this small bit of text the imagery comes to life.  She is a servant girl, he a slave.  While it is not clear that their love is forbidden, the link that exists between their stations in life, as noted by Gizmodo, and race.  Further, the image the artist of the work created seems to pull from illustrated publicity posters of the film.  In these posters Robbie was painted black, though in the film he is very clearly chrome, which is closer to silver.

In addition to occupying spaces of labor often occupied by black bodies, androids are also placed in spaces of violent entertainment that parallel cultural spaces once occupied by black bodies.  Sandra Jackson in her essay Black Bodies in Imagined Futures, discusses the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), and the lack of black human bodies in the imagined future of the film.  Though they are not physically there, the shadow of the these bodies is.  The film clip above is an extended scene from A.I.. In this section of the film we see a crowd of white humans, cheering, eating, shouting, jeering as robots are place on a stage in the center, tortured, killed, their battered bodies put on display until their skeleton frames are dragged away.  The stage is set up like a modern day circus or rock concert, with loud music, flashing lights and multiple stations for various methods of destroying the robots.  Jackson writes, of a perceived similarity to “white vigilantism, such as the Ku Klux Klan, as well as police abuse” (164) against black bodies in this scene.  I would go even further though, and compare the treatment of robots in this scenarios to lynchmobs.  The publicness and celebration seems to have more in common with this configuration of racial brutality than the hidden public actions of the Ku Klux Klan, where people hide their faces, and the authority driven actions of police.

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