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So the first time I watched “Rosa” I was basically just sort of trying to pre-emptively stuff it into my brain before I got spoiled by tumblr. I went back today and rewatched it and found it very moving, and also probably more depressing than the Doctor Who team wanted it to be.
Before we move on to the spoilers, let me identify first the position from which I watched this: I’m a white American born in 1969 and raised in the northeast, mainly in suburbs which were majority affluent and white. My own relationship to American civil rights narratives is therefore complicated. My hot take on Monday was basically me complaining about the ways in which this episode seemed to me to be endorsing a very common but in my view extremely unhelpful version of the civil rights narrative, in which the power of heroic individuals is magnified while the importance of organization and mass mobilization is erased. On rewatch, it appears to me that the episode is attempting to have it both ways, and that I–still defaulting as I do to paranoid reading, and justifiably suspicious most of all of my own relationship to this history–paid more attention to aspects that confirmed my suspicions. Today I will talk more about the aspects of this episode that I thought were interesting in a good way. There will be spoilers.
So here’s one thing I appreciated about this episode right away:
I too learned about Rosa Parks in grade school; we all learned about the civil rights movement and segregation. But growing up white in a rich suburb in the 1970s and 1980s, I did not actually know a lot of Black people. I have recollections of my teachers trying to explain to us about de facto and de jure segregation; but it did not stick. My elementary school was not segregated; but there were very few people of color living within its attendance area. The complex of factors that led to my experience in elementary school being not a whole lot more integrated than it would have been in Arkansas in 1940 was harder for my teachers to explain to us then, and indeed it’s still hard for a lot of people to grasp now. Civil rights narratives are valuable to different Americans for different reasons. For white liberals from the north, venerating Dr. King and Rosa Parks can very easily become a way of ignoring and denying the ways in which we are all still implicated in our nation’s racist history and all still perpetuating racial inequality. So for instance, very young Plaidder, distressed to hear stories about the segregated south, and prone to inserting herself into narratives, used to sometimes daydream about going back in time to the Jim Crow south and resisting segregation. I think for a lot of white Americans, political affiliation is a way of doing the same thing more subtly: imagining themselves onto the right side of that history. We would not have been like those bad white people, we think to ourselves. We are better than that. We would not have gone along with it. We would have changed everything, if only we had been there.
This episode, to its credit, disposes of that fantasy immediately. The Doctor says, before they leave the TARDIS, “We stick together.” This is absolutely standard advice for the Doctor to give before leaving a TARDIS (though more often phrased as “Don’t wander off”) and it just becomes more and more ironic the more time they spend in a setting where “sticking together” actually endangers two of her companions. After being thrown out of the bar, the Doctor’s still trying to low-key ignore the bus rules until Rosa Parks explains to her that it will only lead to more trouble for the Black passengers. The Doctor at one point tries to send Ryan and Yaz back to the TARDIS because she realizes that she is making it harder for them. To survive, and to be effective, they have to be strategic and not heroic. Which means, after a certain point, splitting up. Graham can only get the information from the bus drivers when he’s alone. Ryan can shadow Rosa Parks and ultimately have that not be terrifying for her, but not if he’s with Graham or the Doctor. As a team, they can defeat Kresgo and protect history. But neither as a team nor individually can Graham or the Doctor make daily life in Montgomery any safer for Ryan and Yaz.
So there is an acknowledgment in “Rosa” that real change requires a collective effort. Yaz at one point does say that the cliche about Rosa Parks sitting down because “she was tired and her feet hurt” is bullshit, and it’s established that she is part of an activist network. Team TARDIS’s obsession with ‘protecting history’ does still also suggest that her decision on that particular day was spontaneous, and thus leave the Tiny Actions Change The World story there for people who want it. But rewatching it, I thought: well, even if the boycott was already planned, she still had to make the decision not to obey every time she made it. Even if the decision is taken ahead of time, in the moment she still has to put herself in danger. She still has to be willing to be the one who starts the trouble, even though she is quite conscious of how vulnerable that will make her. And I think that by paying more attention this time around to Vinette Robinson’s performance, and less to the caper going on around her with Team TARDIS and the Once and Future Nazi, that I finally got the story that this episode is trying to tell about Rosa Parks.
As for the story that this episode is telling about the Doctor, Doctor Who, and the BBC more generally, I find that VERY interesting. I know Vinette Robinson mainly as Sergeant Sally Donovan, a.k.a. the most tragically underutilized character on Sherlock. Though her Southern accent gets wonky at times, otherwise Robinson turns in a very nuanced and affecting performance here as Rosa Parks, thereby demonstrating that she was even more tragically underutilized than we thought. In addition to finally giving Robinson some scope for her talents, the premise of this episode also centers Ryan and Yaz, making their experience as people of color in Britain part of the story in a way it really hasn’t been before on Doctor Who. I’m not primarily talking about their conversation behind the boiler or gas tank or whatever in which they make the obligatory point that racism still exists. I’m talking about the fact that this particular history is shown to be meaningful for them in ways that it can’t be for Graham and the Doctor. Both Ryan and Yaz are beyond excited to get to interact with King and Parks, and both are able to ask them for something they can take back with them to their own time, where they’re still fighting the same struggle. That’s very different from what used to happen when, say, Mickey hopped aboard with Rose and Nine or Ten was dragging Martha around the spacetime continuum. In the “Family of Blood” two-parter, particularly, Martha’s experience of Edwardian racism is not treated as important in its own right, and Ten never really acknowledges how deeply he hurt her by giving her all that responsibility and then essentially abandoning her to a racist environment. Doctor Who, under RTD at least, made an effort to do nontraditional casting. But this episode shows why casting performers of color in roles that could be played by anyone isn’t precisely the same thing, and doesn’t do the same kind of work, as telling stories that center people of color.
This episode also raises the question of why the Doctor is still white and what that means. All the stuff about the “protecting history” caper that annoyed Hot Take me is, from that point of view, necessary in order to achieve what is undeniably a powerful closing sequence which calls out this and a few related Doctor Who traditions. Ryan who solves the problem, not just by standing up to Kresgo, but by sending him back to the past–something the Doctor either hasn’t thought of doing or wasn’t willing to do. The Doctor, in contrast, can only become part of the solution by accepting her role as part of the problem–and by convincing Graham to accept it, even though he desperately doesn’t want to. I guess I can see why the scene of Rosa’s refusal on the bus, with the Doctor, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz all watching silently, is not one that the writers would want to give up.
I could still 100% have done without the inspirational speech in the TARDIS at the end, though. Because it had actually the opposite effect on me. Yes, Rosa Parks and Dr. King and all the people who fought with them changed the world. And at one time we had a President willing to celebrate that (for all his other well-documented problems). And at one time we had a Black president. And now, two years later, we have…this.
Time is not a line. Neither is progress. Yaz’s “positive” view of history is hard to embrace when you’re in the middle of a backlash. And of course that’s why this episode is being made now: because it’s all coming back, on both sides of the pond. One of the first documented effects of Brexit was an increase in the harassment of people of color on public transit. And everyone can see what Buttercup’s election has produced over here. The promise of tomorrow just keeps receding. We have to keep chasing it. Congressional medals of honor notwithstanding, it just feels at this point as if there will never be a break in the struggle. As if nothing less than total commitment will ever be possible if we don’t want that past to resurge. It all leaves me in a place where I am not super-open to inspiration speeches made by other white people. But who knows? Perhaps the staginess of that section–the way they all seem to be arranged as if for a promo poster, the ridiculous churning of the main crystal in the background (sorry Arwel–I love your TARDIS but you definitely should have made that thing stationary), the swelling music, and the Doctor’s beatific expression–is meant to be ironic. Maybe it’s meant to get us to look askance at the way we turn to the (up to this point, always white) Doctor for the final summing up, and give her the authority to tell us how history works. Maybe we’re meant to think, after all this, that there’s something weird about a show that keeps creating situations where the character with all the knowledge, experience, and technology is always white, and often surrounded by people of color either looking up at them adoringly or in desperate need of their help. At least maybe that’s the reparative reading.
Anyway. Short story: upon mature consideration, I like it. But I sometimes wish I had some cheap an nasty time travel that would knock me forward into the near future, after Buttercup is no longer in politics. But then, maybe it wouldn’t be any better there.