Doctor Who and Rosa: Sitting with the discomfort of racism

Picture Shows: Raymond Parks (DAVID RUBIN), Rosa Parks (VINETTE ROBINSON)

The Doctor and companions meet Rosa Parks and find themselves a part of history. In the process, they’re teaching us that we’re all a part of history. Doctor Who often guides us in how to be good and caring people, and Rosa is no exception.

Dec 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus and the bus driver had her forcibly removed and arrested. She wasn’t the first to fight the racist law, but her arrest led to a boycott of the buses and eventually, desegregating the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. In the last days of May 2020, bus drivers notably took a different stand.

Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the US and in several other countries after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police. Floyd wasn’t the first to die in these circumstances, but like Parks in 1955, this event was the “last straw” for many and sparked an outrage that demands change. Minnesota and New York bus drivers refused to aid police in transporting protesters for mass arrest. The headlines combining bus drivers and Civil Rights issues brought to mind Rosa Parks (both the real woman, and this powerful episode), and how much things have changed yet just how much they’ve stayed the same.

The Doctor Who episode Rosa opens with a crane shot of Montgomery, Alabama, 1943. Cuts to Rosa Parks getting on the bus, paying her fare, and then arguing with the bus driver about having to re-board from the rear entrance. When she finally complied, he drove off without her (not an uncommon occurrence for Black people in that time).

It’s around this point in the episode that I realize my education is lacking. (This episode is “surprisingly” historically accurate.) I either never learned, or later forgot that she had a previous altercation about this seating issue with the same bus driver, James Blake.

Once the Doctor and her companions arrive in 1955, Ryan (a Black man from 21st century England) mistakenly tries to be nice to a white woman and gets slapped and threatened for it by the woman’s husband. Rosa arrives on scene and does some sweet talking to calm the woman’s white man, then turns to the group and lectures them for being idiots after what happened to Emmet Till. Doctor Who often shies away from addressing racism directly, but seeing one of the Doctor’s companions treated that way is important historical context for the race relations of that time.

BARI, ITALY – JUNE 06: Men wear protective masks and carry a protest banner during a Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd on June 06, 2020 in Bari, Italy. The protest has been organized against racism after the death of George Floyd. (Photo by Donato Fasano/Getty Images)

Racism and the companions

The Doctor recognizes “It’s easy for me here. It’s more dangerous for you.” Talking to Yaz and Ryan, she offers to let them go back to the TARDIS and wait where it’s safer. “You can walk away from this.” But as they respond that Rosa Parks can’t and doesn’t, they choose not to, either.

They are, in that moment, choosing not to find the safety of the TARDIS and eventually the relative safety (aka slightly less terrifying) of their own time. However, they are also living their reality. Outside of the TARDIS, there’s nowhere they can go to escape the effects of racism.

Ryan (a Black man) and Yaz (a Pakistani woman) have a heart to heart behind the motel about their continuing struggles with racism today. It’s a quiet moment as they express their frustrations and share their experiences, and seems intended to draw empathy from the viewers.

But listening to Yaz and Ryan discussing their lived experiences is not enough. We must doubly apply that listening, that empathy, that anger that comes from observing injustice, to the real Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in the world. They’re already out there, already sharing their experiences, spreading their stories. They’ve been telling us for decades that Rosa Parks and MLK Jr. didn’t end racism, and we’ve not been listening.

Graham talks about when he first met his wife, Grace. She found out he was a bus driver and immediately said he’d better not be like James Blake (or “Blake the Snake”, as she called him). Graham had to ask who he was, because like a lot of white people, he had no direct reason to focus on Civil Rights history until he met her. A Black woman he cared about shared her people’s history, so he paid attention.

We all need to be paying attention and educating ourselves (we can start here) without requiring that personal connection/investment first. These are people, human beings, and basic morals tell us to care about each other. It’s time to listen. And it’s time to act.

Time for them to act, too

They come to realize they have to keep history in order to make sure everything goes as it’s supposed to. They’re fighting a time-traveling racist, a man so hateful he’s gone back in time to stop a protest and the chain of events that will follow because he thinks Black people need to remember “their place.” He’s got a prison-installed neural controller that prevents him from killing people, but he can nudge things just enough to change history. This means the Doctor and her gang need to make adjustments for all the tiny changes he’s trying to make to knock history off course.

The first time they all get on the bus together, and Ryan’s at the back on his own, the Doctor and Graham both express the injustice of it and their shame in it. Yaz debates whether she’s allowed in the ‘white’ section before she finally sits down.

Later on, once the historical bus ride is under way, they realize that if the Doctor, Graham, and Yaz get off the bus, there will be no reason for Blake to ask Black passengers to stand. They must stay on the bus to ensure Rosa Parks’s protest and arrest, much as they don’t want to.

Graham’s line, “No. No, I don’t want to be part of this,” tugged at my heart when I first saw it. I wouldn’t want to be a part of that, either. And the Doctor’s response, “We have to. I’m sorry. We have to not help her,” sounds so wrong. So cruel and uncaring. It was uncomfortable to watch them not intervene, but only recently did I see the layers behind it.

Picture shows: Rosa Parks (VINETTE ROBINSON), Krasko (JOSH BOWMAN) Krasko is the white supremacist villain of the episode.

“I don’t want to be a part of this”

Most of us don’t want to be a part of the oppression of other people, much like the Doctor and her companions. This is the activism they must take in their time travel situation – maintaining a turning point that will lead to changes in Civil Rights. It’s symbolic of the work white people must do within so that we can push for further changes now.

They must acknowledge that they are, indeed, a part of Rosa’s oppression, and benefiting from the racist system. They must literally sit – in the white section – with that discomfort despite how much they don’t want to be guilty of this. They must witness her experience from beginning to end; the order to give up seats, her choice to sit back down and refuse to move, the hateful bus driver yelling at her, and finally the arrest that will lead to the bus boycotts across town.

We white people must learn from Graham and the Doctor here. We don’t want to see ourselves as complicit, but even if we’re not demanding a seat on the bus, we’re benefiting in countless tiny ways because that’s how the system’s been set up for centuries. And only when we sit with that inside ourselves can we make changes in future Civil Rights.

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“I don’t want to be a part of this” is every white person’s internal fight. Before we can do any true anti-racist work (like Graham is by maintaining this vital moment in Civil Rights history), we must first accept that truth. We ARE a part of this, no matter how much we don’t want to be. We’re not used to being uncomfortable in such a way, so we tend to seek the positive, look on the bright side, or just “avoid the negativity.” That discomfort is important to sit with, unpack, and work through. Unchecked and ignored, that discomfort is just another obstacle to anti-racist work.

Unlike the Doctor and Graham, we are living in the present. When we sit with our discomfort, we need to do it on our own time, so that when we’re actually witnessing current injustice, we can step in. But to prepare for stepping in without causing further harm, we must learn.

(I would like to give credit and say thank you to Mia Young for her input and perspective on this article, and to the mods of the excellent brave space for learning anti-racism, Black Women Lead: A Theory of Modern Feminism who’ve taught me so much.)

Anti-racism work from white people requires specific steps. Sit. Listen. Believe. Sit more if needed. Learn. Then act. What stage are you at? (Consider these scaffolding anti-racism resources.) What’s keeping you from moving to the next stage? Look around at the struggles of minorities in our world today and ask yourself: what would the Doctor do?