#ty for sending this i wasnt aware of how.. white audiences reacted to the episode and now like

[aq2003]

I find the decision to write the first Doctor as sort of cartoonishly bigoted in the episode with Twelve fascinating, because it shifts the blame for the racism, sexism etc present in early Doctor Who from the writers and producers to the *character*. It wasn’t the Doctor who wrote limited character arcs for female characters in comparison to male ones, and it wasn’t the Doctor who decided to use yellow-face for the characters in some episodes - that was the writers and production team. Y’know, real people. People whose legacy the current writers and producers of the show - who have also largely been white men, just like their predecessors - owe their jobs to.

And the persistent problem with continuing to sideline and tokenise the characters of some of the female companions and characters of colour in the service of centring the doctor as the (until recently) white male protagonist - that continued for most of the modern reboot in some form. Some of the elements of that were even new innovations under the modern writers (looking at you Moffat but you are not the only offender.) I mean, we’re talking about the portrayal of One as the past’s ambassador for sexism in iirc the exact same episode where Chris Chibnall reversed the previous episode’s ending of Bill surviving with Heather and re-buried the lesbians by sending Bill directly to the ‘your soul is canonically dead’ zone.

I absolutely can’t speak for the whole of the first Doctor’s tenure because I’ve only seen about 2/3 of his surviving episodes, but from the episodes I have seen, he didn’t even talk like that. There was a very big problem with that run of the show, but it was a different problem to the one the episode with One and Twelve is describing. One was weird as hell, but he was much less overtly hostile, wished much less bodily harm on minority groups and even dipped into less microaggressions and dogwhistles than most older white British people do now. That isn’t to say One’s behaviour in Old Who was something to aim for, it’s to say that a lot of the improvement in the attitude of white people in Britain over the last half-century has been performative at best, imaginary at worst, a lot of our dogwhistles are new and especially alarming for that reason - and it comforts white people to imagine that the racism and sexism of the past was overt and vulgar and unlike theirs, and that their bigotry by comparison is lesser and better and therefore doesn’t need further work; that now people affected by it just need to learn to live with it, because you’re lucky we’re not like our grandparents.

But that excuse doesn’t really work if (tw racism, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, death) some sects of British society talk more positively about drowning immigrants in the English Channel than they did 100 years ago, does it?

That excuse doesn’t work if your grandparents were actually quite a lot like you.

I live in the UK, about half the people I know watched the special with Twelve and One, and considering that vanishingly few modern viewers have seen or remember the first Doctor or any early Old Who, there was this odd awkward relief from most of the white people I watched the episode with, like they’d been absolved from Britain’s historical and current racism by the burning of an effigy. Like that bigotry coming from One’s mouth was a reassurance that this country’s bigotry had always been as cartoonish and ineffectual and easy to see as the lines Chris Chibnall and his colleagues wrote for One; that white people living in the UK now are fundamentally different than they were; and by watching Bill and One’s (still white) successor refuse his cartoonishly awful worldview, white Brits had somehow cleansed themselves and buried the past completely.

But the vast majority of the racism, bigotry, sexism in the original run of Doctor Who and still present in various forms in the show now did not actually take the form of nice clear, simple statements of bigoted beliefs from the characters’ mouths - it was in the writing. The way characters and especially cultures were portrayed. The yellow-face in one of Two’s story arcs really stuck in my mind, but the way Old Who handled nonwhite cultures in general was often horrific. The first Doctor was often perfectly polite, but women and characters of colour were sidelined and (even in instances when it was clearly accidental) dangerously misrepresented throughout the show in ways that persist well into the post-2000 reboot, because the sexism and racism wasn’t in the character.

The sexism and racism was in the writers’ room.

I don’t have any sentimental attachment to Old Who, I was born about a decade after it ended, but deflecting the cultural problems in the BBC that persist to this day onto one of the show’s characters, by having him express an easily-digestible form of bigotry much less dangerous and insidious than the one that was actually present in the early show, feels like a dangerous form of scapegoating.

Something I think would have meant much, much more would have been an apology *outside of the show* from the BBC and the show’s current writers for the wide variety of sincerely-held bigotries that were actually present in the first run of the show, and a public acknowledgement of the pervasive, insidious forms those bigotries actually often took in the show’s writing - and also an acknowledgement of the show’s continuing shortfalls in its handling of race and gender over the last twenty years - because that would have been much more productively challenging for viewers of the show (more or less the whole of the British public at some point in their lives) to have to consider. Which I have to assume is why they went down the reassuring ‘the first Doctor has died for our sins’ route instead.

This is just my two cents, I am also white and British so please take this perspective with a grain of salt.

Mm. I don’t know. This country loves letting ourselves off too easily, and the writing of One in that episode feels the like easiest and for that reason least effective way of reckoning with the way we were in the 1900s. Don’t worry everyone, at the turn of the millennium both the show and the country of Britain were reborn without sin!

this is such a good writeup anon. i don't have a lot to add - just that im asian-american and a lot of what you said aligns with rhetoric i've also seen in the states - that being this sense that racism is just something of the past rather than a fundamental, systemic issue that the country was built on. and yeah one thing that really struck me while watching twice upon a time was how one's bigotry was always framed as a joke. bill straight up says to twelve "i hope we laugh about it for 20 years" or whatever and it just reeks of "To Our White Audience: be not afraid. you're not racist like the 1st doctor who lived far into the past. see? the one black character knows we're not racist now. please give yourselves a pat on the back". and like, it's not funny to any people of color that might be watching. it's just prioritizing the comfort of white people. and it's pretty terrible that moffat (he wrote the episode, chibnall just wrote thirteen's first lines. but also i know chibnall took nuwho into its least progressive era so...) felt like he had a right to make light of this stuff when he has committed some pretty egregious crimes in his tenure himself