one of the things I actually like about ‘Doctor Who’

I’ve written several posts attempting to elaborate on what just doesn’t gel with me about Doctor Who.

No surprise, Doctor Who is a Loud(ly).White.Dominated.Narrative with a White.Savior.Presented.as.a.God. New acronyms, folks! LWDN! WSPG! Probably won’t catch on though.

There are several things I do like about the show though, still haven’t got around to writing that post…. One thing I like is the composer Murray Gold’s work and how it goes with scenes, emotions, and situations in the show.

My favorite piece of Gold’s is “The Greatest Story Never Told”.

Other songs I like are “Every Star, Every Planet”, “The Dream of a Normal Death”, “The Impossible Planet”, “Vale Decem” (*in tears*), “All the Strange, Strange Creatures”, and “Melody Pond”.

Its amazing how they can produce fictional  sentient life forms but still have no idea how to regularly and fairly portray characters who are not white and are from their own planet. Y’all ain’t ready for space, Oods, or Time Lords yet–please step out of the TARDIS.

But from time to time, the music is still okay….

To All Whovians

I don’t really count myself as a Whovian. I’ve seen it, I like stuff about it, but my criticism of it transcends my need to praise it.

If you ONLY want to hear what I like about Doctor Who, you are on the WRONG blog. I have exactly one post about what I like about Doctor Who and its not published or finished yet. It speaks in lovely butterfly volumes, compared to the usual kind of criticism I do of white-dominated media.

Doctor Who is an okay bit of fiction but it is by no means beyond criticism.  I understand why its so popular, I even watched it myself.

But it is a perfect example of what is wrong with white people like most of what they produce and appear to imagine.

The Doctor is supposedly pacifist and is supposed to be anti-racist, believing in hope and blah-blah-yadda-yadda of mankind.

I get the message and I question who is sending the message and why, since it contradicts my reality, wreaks havoc with my ability to suspend my belief, and presents people worshiping a white male alien (time lord fairy, as I call him).  A choice of poisons.

Please put down your prime time television crack, you sound like a bunch of addicts in denial. Doctor Who is okay, its brilliant in some aspects, but it is not above reproach, especially for a Black woman such as myself who can see through a bunch of scientifically imperialist, colorblind, neo-liberal bullshit from a mile away.

The Eleventh Doctor, Geronimo, and Why whites Suddenly Like Pacifism

I can’t quite put my finger on why the Eleventh Doctor using “Geronimo!” as his catch phrase rubs me the wrong way.

Oh, wait, maybe I can.

It has something to do with him being white, British, and not Apache. It has to do with the whole white appropriating and co-opting of non-white culture and bodies, including names, language, and representation for fun and entertainment. White people are infamous for using non-white people’s own language against them, to villainize, oppress, justify acts of violence and racism, and malign them. Let’s not even talk about how they think they’re doing the First Peoples a favor and an honor by naming stuff they stole, colonized, use for destruction and war, sports teams, and commodify after them. Hella racist.

Why does the Eleventh Doctor have to have an American west theme? The theme is sexist, white supremacist, and its racist all at the same time.

I can’t help but think of the SUPPPERRR racist role and usage of “Indians” in Peter Pan and The Neverending Story. And American westerns? The whole time period– Oh my f**king goodness, don’t even get me started. So I’m not okay with special white time lord fairies from Gallifrey yelling “GERONIMO!” every time he’s about to do something stupid or something the producers think is supposed to amuse me. Him yelling “Geronimo” is like yelling “Red Skins” with white appropriation just slapped together like a poisonous jammie dodger.

Shoulda stuck with “Allons-y!”

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Raining down injustice and suffering on non-white people for centuries, they have now contrived a very popular fictional world with a dude called the Doctor talking ‘bout some pacifism, which I view as a representation of their agenda whether its purposeful or not. Oh, so, now y’all want to be pacifist, you’re trying to present the pacifist patriarchal alien superhero. A world where they start the problem then end the problem , too, without really changing a damn thing. We don’t get to say when its over, they do. And that’s how they continue to assert their power over non-whites everyday and in fiction. By using manipulation and everyone’s desire for peace to commit an even greater crime—putting a big white band aid on a gaping wound, by ignoring the root of the problem and the impacts.

There won’t be peace until whites acknowledge and pay for their continued crimes. Why won’t they produce a show that’s about that? White people stop being racist oppressive douches—THE END.

Because no time lord fairy can “fix” the human race without placing himself as Earth’s god and becoming the ultimate oppressor himself.

That is where my suspension of disbelief, if I ever had it to begin with, ultimately ends.

As intelligent as the show may seem or try to present itself, the Doctor Who universe is yet another place where whites can pretend that the long history of injustices and crimes against humanity they have committed against non-whites (and continue to commit) don’t exist, with lots of interracial couples and timey-wimey science–and starting with the fact that the main protagonist, for all intents and purposes, is white and uses pacifism to ignore the root of conflicts or uses his power to manipulate everything around him when he can’t see himself as everyone’s hero  in the end or just because he can. A very white supremacist tactic.

So now allow me, a white man who has helped and continues to help oppress and destroy your culture and people (and that of many others for decades), to use your now historical name as my catch phrase.

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‘Doctor Who’, atheism, two-way meta-crisis god complex with theism*

Of course its okay to portray a man as god and worship him especially if he’s white and has scientific imperialism to back him.

Lets count the many times the Doctor gets practically prayed and bowed down to in his last two incarnations

Dear writers and atheists producing Doctor Who, you’re not doing anything revolutionary or new by removing one patriarchal god’s religion (crosses and cock) and replacing it with another (science and cock).

In the hands of man’s interpretation and limited understanding, both are flawed. And certainly nothing to be worshiped.

 The chief issue I take with atheism — that is, “atheism” here meaning the most common patterns of atheist discourse, not all the individuals themselves (although straight, White, and male atheists are particularly susceptible) — is that it does not oppose oppression.  It opposes theism, and in doing so, it uses oppression and the suffering of others as a rhetorical tool for a smear campaign without actually showing real compassion or support for the targets of violence.

—acetheist, Atheist Heterosexism

 

*This was meant to be a much longer post on a list of Doctor Who cons, but I thought I’d cut to the point for this one.

Regeneration, the perfect representation of white privilege

I was reading River Song’s article on the TARDIS wikia and came across a mention of Mels’ regeneration into River Song.  Even with all of the problematic allusions, sexism, and references surrounding River Song’s character, she’s actually one of my favorites.

Even so, there’s something about her turning from a white child into a Black woman into a white woman that just rubs me the wrong way.

You have to look at Doctor Who not only as fictional story but as a production. Who’s producing Doctor Who? Who is starring and who has starred in Doctor Who? Who controls who appears in Doctor Who?

Who. is. WRITING. this. show??? Okay?

The show appears to be written by outright racist whites and colorblind racist whites, like most of everything on television. I can’t speak for people of the Black/African Diaspora in Britain, or anyone else but myself, and this is how I see it:

The idea that Time Lords (especially the ones sticking their noses in Earth affairs like the Doctor) have some control over their regeneration and can be any “color” they want is a sickening and dreadful idea to me as a Black woman. One minute, Black–the next minute white, like changing your shoes. White people think being Black is convenient as long as you don’t have to stay Black or experience what it means to be Black, like grow up Black and stay that way. That’s the problem with fictions like Cloud Atlas, Doctor Who and Avatar–the narrative itself automatically decentralizes and derails any connection to heritages of Color/non-white heritage that defies and threatens the unjustly established supremacy of whiteness , aside from outward appearance. That means its okay to appear to be Black, or non-white, as long as whiteness remains unchallenged as the dominant narrative and worldview.

To the white viewer, its probably all shits and giggles to pretend you can be a different race, one that you continue to unapologetically mocked, commoditized, and committed every crime against humanity possible as long as you can again be white or Asian or whatever you think will suit your purposes.

My race and ethnicity is not a costume. And that’s the problem with white people who want to be anything but white as long as they can go back to being white at the end of the day. That’s the problem with these “racial chameleon” characters.

And when has the Doctor ever not been white??? Never, right. Out of all eleven (and, soon, twelve) of his regenerations, he has always been white. Why is that? If its all just a matter of  “color”, like a t-shirt or a pair of pants. If color is that easy.  The Doctor stays just as white as a table cloth.

There’s always going to be some trumped up, pathetic reason for why this is, because racism is so rationalized people don’t want to see it for what it is. Its the next best thing to blackface, only they get real brown people to be the stand-ins. And as long as you can rationalize it to right people, no one questions it, no one says ‘no. just no’.

As a conscious Black female viewer, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. Yet I understand it and see it for what it is. And that’s why I’m writing this.

Post-racial science fiction white fuckery.

‘Doctor Who’, the Ultimate Superhero Trope

I started watching Doctor Who from the Ninth Doctor (2005), after considering it with great skepticism as a production originating from the racist capital of the whole planet.

Its strange to be tentatively writing here that I actually enjoy many aspects of it. Its a nice bit of whimsy and adventure. Other criticism withheld here for now, there are even brown people on the show (even if whiteness remains central), that’s half a step up from American television shows. I’ve even written down the things I see that I like the most in terms of sentient life forms encountered.

With that said, the biggest issue I have with the show is the Doctor himself. As important as his friends/companions/allies/lovers are made out to be, the whole of the entire universe, beginning and end, is still centered around him. Sounds like yet another huge ego boast for every guy out there that’s vicariously imagining himself to be the last Time Lord from Gallifrey.

I once pointed out how a pretty cool female character like Ryuuzetsu just had died for Naruto in Blood Prison, the fifth Naruto movie. My friend’s response was

“The show is about Naruto, not who doesn’t die for Naruto.”

And the same can be said of the Doctor. Through his companions and encounters with other sentient life forms, an effort is made to decentralize him but it seems the creators of Doctor Who always revert back to plots drenched in the mindless rhetorical worship of the Doctor as more interesting. It’s like the writers sat down and came up with the greatest white patriarchal-superhero-god complex fantasy gone completely insane that they could possibly think of. Yes, I said white–this is still true, even tho he’s from another planet.

If you think race isn’t an issue in Doctor Who, then ask yourself: How invisible would a Black Time Lord be in the white-dominated Western societies at any point in the recorded history visited in the show?

Let’s look at the entirety of Martha Jones’ time with the Doctor as his companion, especially compared to Rose Tyler.

Or ask why the Transatlantic Slave Trade and other crimes against humanity wasn’t prevented by the Doctor, who spends an annoying amount of time lecturing humans about how they need to be “better” (without ever being a little time lord faerie to the people who are victims of times when they weren’t) and championing any time period he fancies and comes across except the ones too problematic and incriminating for Britain and America to fess up to. The worst and most logical answer would be that the enslavement of Black peoples by white Europeans, is a “fixed point” in time–meaning that it was something that was “supposed” to happen. So the Doctor can save the Oods from humans but not save humans from themselves? This show is chocked full of deceptive post-racial propaganda!

All this is to say that tho The Doctor is often presented as a sentimental character, his entire existence is about power, the power he has over those around him.

In its title character, Doctor Who presents me with what I will dub the “renaissance man” superhero trope (The Ultimate Polymath Trope).  Contrary to all this white savior worship and idealism, I’d prefer to see the Doctor, as Donna Noble so aptly said to the Tenth Doctor, as “a long streak of nothing, y’know, alien nothing!“.