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Thoughts on Race in the This Season's Doctor Who
I’ve been quiet about this season because I’ve really been enjoying it, and critique inspires more words than praise. I love Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor. As inherently tired as I am of contemporary, young, London woman companions, I really like Ruby, too, and I’m enjoying the stories themselves more than any season since the Tenth Doctor. But I do have a few thinky thoughts about the handling of race in the last two episodes: lots of praise, some frustration, and some hypothetical suggestions.
Spoilers below the cut
Like almost everybody else, I was deeply impressed by “Dot and Bubble,” signally its handling of white supremacy. Pitch perfect. I have no notes. (As an aside, I asked my kids, who are Black, when they first realized the episode was about white supremacy. Both said they immediately noticed that all the cast, minus the Doctor, was white, but my daughter (14) never realized the society was white supremacist. My son (17) got it about the same time I did, near the end when Lindy said it wasn’t acceptable to socialize with the Doctor in person. I think, with our American ears, we all initially missed that there was a line about voodoo, which I’m kind of glad of, since my kids are Haitian, and that’s a very specific dig.)
I was less happy with the handling of race in “Rogue,” i.e. treating it as a non-issue: several people of color at the Regency party being treated exactly the same as the white folks. NB: I’m told this episode is playing off Bridgerton, which I haven’t watched but gather treats race similarly? I can’t comment on that. I also know that many people of color enjoy having escapist fun through stories in which POC are not being slapped in the face with racism all the time, and that’s totally valid. At the same time, I think that way of handling race is problematic and uncreative, and I wish they’d done it differently.
Problematic
(I’m using the lit crit sense of the word to mean not necessarily wrong but iffy, raising thorny questions.)
Personally—and I feel the same way about misogyny—I think that completely or virtually ignoring historical oppression trivializes the struggles of the oppressed. Moreover, this approach to race in current historical shows (ex. recent Black Estella in Great Expectations) is so common that I worry that it might suggest to some viewers that the past wasn’t that bad—and that’s a little dangerous, because it was. And our society still is.
Which brings me to colonialism. (This may be too much to lay at the feet of a fantasy like Doctor Who, but let me lay it out anyway.) Jane Austen’s world was built on the exploitation of Black labor, and presenting Black people (and POC in general) as treated just like white people obscures that fact, just as Austen’s original writing does by invisibilizing Black people. This matters because, in our present world, (mostly) white comfort in the Global North is STILL built on the exploitation of brown peoples’ labor; it’s destroying their lives, their countries, and, rapidly, the Earth’s ability to support life as we know it. This fact is almost completely obscured in the Global North, and that invisibilization may be the most dangerous thing that has happened in human history. So further obscuring those relations is problematic, yes, maybe even in an escapist fantasy.
Other Ways to Address Racism
I completely get DW not wanting two downer episodes about racism against Black people in a row. Maybe it shouldn’t have jumped straight from a white supremacy story to a story set in a white supremacist culture, but given that it did, I think there’s a good way out that would tie the two stories together with some nice attention to the weight of “Dot and Bubble.”
The Doctor could briefly remark (maybe prompted by Ruby) that, while he’s obviously well aware of post-Columbian racism, he’s never had to deal with it personally before, and it’s a bummer, and so he’s going to use some perception-fieldy device to make the people at the Regency party ignore race. That wouldn’t address the number of POC in their initial guest list, which I’d probably trim down to explicitly one Black family (historically plausible) and maybe Emily, who looks to me part-Asian, having a throwaway line about people not wanting to marry into an Oriental family. There: minimal hassle with race while still having some POC guests and a nice reminder of “Dot and Bubble,” as well as acknowledgement of the adjustments the post-Columbian England-loving Doctor would have to make to being a Black man.
Another option, with just a bit more “race” in it, would be to skip the perception field and just add a handful of lines lampshading race. See Emily above, maybe the Doctor passing himself off as a foreign prince. It wouldn’t have taken much to at least nod to reality.
It is a fair point that having to address racism every time the Doctor goes anywhere in the post-Columbian imperial world would be a bummer. (Welcome to having a Black protagonist.) But here’s an idea for mitigating that difficulty. How about exploring brown cultures? How about spending a bit less time in 1800s England and a bit more time in ancient African empires, or the really ancient world before humanity left Africa, or out with Sub-Saharan herders, or ancient Australia? How about, instead of casting a critical mass of POC in white imperialist historical settings, the show center non-white-imperialist historical settings? It’s done precious little of this: some of Asia, the Middle-East. Has Doctor Who been to ancient Egypt? I feel like it must have, but I can’t personally remember it. The show could even be up front about the Doctor wanting to explore these parts of the world more because he reads as a different race now, and that makes those places easier to blend into, and maybe he’s even found a new interest in Black history. Stranger things have happened.
This would, of course, require careful cultural consulting, particularly the closer you get to the present, but there’s nothing that says the show can’t do that. There’s nothing that says they can’t hire writers from diverse parts of the world to write about their own histories.
Anyway, that’s my two cents on race thus far. As to the rest of the season, others have pretty much summed up what I might say, and basically I’m thrilled to fannishly engaged in Doctor Who again.
Spoilers below the cut
Like almost everybody else, I was deeply impressed by “Dot and Bubble,” signally its handling of white supremacy. Pitch perfect. I have no notes. (As an aside, I asked my kids, who are Black, when they first realized the episode was about white supremacy. Both said they immediately noticed that all the cast, minus the Doctor, was white, but my daughter (14) never realized the society was white supremacist. My son (17) got it about the same time I did, near the end when Lindy said it wasn’t acceptable to socialize with the Doctor in person. I think, with our American ears, we all initially missed that there was a line about voodoo, which I’m kind of glad of, since my kids are Haitian, and that’s a very specific dig.)
I was less happy with the handling of race in “Rogue,” i.e. treating it as a non-issue: several people of color at the Regency party being treated exactly the same as the white folks. NB: I’m told this episode is playing off Bridgerton, which I haven’t watched but gather treats race similarly? I can’t comment on that. I also know that many people of color enjoy having escapist fun through stories in which POC are not being slapped in the face with racism all the time, and that’s totally valid. At the same time, I think that way of handling race is problematic and uncreative, and I wish they’d done it differently.
Problematic
(I’m using the lit crit sense of the word to mean not necessarily wrong but iffy, raising thorny questions.)
Personally—and I feel the same way about misogyny—I think that completely or virtually ignoring historical oppression trivializes the struggles of the oppressed. Moreover, this approach to race in current historical shows (ex. recent Black Estella in Great Expectations) is so common that I worry that it might suggest to some viewers that the past wasn’t that bad—and that’s a little dangerous, because it was. And our society still is.
Which brings me to colonialism. (This may be too much to lay at the feet of a fantasy like Doctor Who, but let me lay it out anyway.) Jane Austen’s world was built on the exploitation of Black labor, and presenting Black people (and POC in general) as treated just like white people obscures that fact, just as Austen’s original writing does by invisibilizing Black people. This matters because, in our present world, (mostly) white comfort in the Global North is STILL built on the exploitation of brown peoples’ labor; it’s destroying their lives, their countries, and, rapidly, the Earth’s ability to support life as we know it. This fact is almost completely obscured in the Global North, and that invisibilization may be the most dangerous thing that has happened in human history. So further obscuring those relations is problematic, yes, maybe even in an escapist fantasy.
Other Ways to Address Racism
I completely get DW not wanting two downer episodes about racism against Black people in a row. Maybe it shouldn’t have jumped straight from a white supremacy story to a story set in a white supremacist culture, but given that it did, I think there’s a good way out that would tie the two stories together with some nice attention to the weight of “Dot and Bubble.”
The Doctor could briefly remark (maybe prompted by Ruby) that, while he’s obviously well aware of post-Columbian racism, he’s never had to deal with it personally before, and it’s a bummer, and so he’s going to use some perception-fieldy device to make the people at the Regency party ignore race. That wouldn’t address the number of POC in their initial guest list, which I’d probably trim down to explicitly one Black family (historically plausible) and maybe Emily, who looks to me part-Asian, having a throwaway line about people not wanting to marry into an Oriental family. There: minimal hassle with race while still having some POC guests and a nice reminder of “Dot and Bubble,” as well as acknowledgement of the adjustments the post-Columbian England-loving Doctor would have to make to being a Black man.
Another option, with just a bit more “race” in it, would be to skip the perception field and just add a handful of lines lampshading race. See Emily above, maybe the Doctor passing himself off as a foreign prince. It wouldn’t have taken much to at least nod to reality.
It is a fair point that having to address racism every time the Doctor goes anywhere in the post-Columbian imperial world would be a bummer. (Welcome to having a Black protagonist.) But here’s an idea for mitigating that difficulty. How about exploring brown cultures? How about spending a bit less time in 1800s England and a bit more time in ancient African empires, or the really ancient world before humanity left Africa, or out with Sub-Saharan herders, or ancient Australia? How about, instead of casting a critical mass of POC in white imperialist historical settings, the show center non-white-imperialist historical settings? It’s done precious little of this: some of Asia, the Middle-East. Has Doctor Who been to ancient Egypt? I feel like it must have, but I can’t personally remember it. The show could even be up front about the Doctor wanting to explore these parts of the world more because he reads as a different race now, and that makes those places easier to blend into, and maybe he’s even found a new interest in Black history. Stranger things have happened.
This would, of course, require careful cultural consulting, particularly the closer you get to the present, but there’s nothing that says the show can’t do that. There’s nothing that says they can’t hire writers from diverse parts of the world to write about their own histories.
Anyway, that’s my two cents on race thus far. As to the rest of the season, others have pretty much summed up what I might say, and basically I’m thrilled to fannishly engaged in Doctor Who again.