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The Representation of Race in Doctor Who: 'Rosa'

'Rosa' (S11 E3) has a lot to say about race and relations in mid 20th century America.

By Nathan AllanPublished 4 years ago 9 min read
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The Doctor and Rosa Parks on a bus in Montgomery.

In ‘Rosa’, the main protagonists, the Doctor and her three friends (two of which are people of colour) land in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, a day before the events which start the Montgomery bus boycott when brought there by the Doctor’s time machine. They soon realise that the town is unfriendly to ‘coloureds’ when Ryan Sinclair, a black teenager and friend of the Doctor, is assaulted. They soon encounter Rosa Parks and a white racist time-travelling criminal that attempts to prevent Rosa’s actions to divert the course of history to create a future where civil rights do not exist.

Representation is a vital concept in media. It helps produce meaning, tell a story, can be used to promote certain ideologies and conform to set beliefs in a culture. The concept can be used to represent nations, cultures, groups or individuals in particular ways. They show “how the world is socially constructed and represented to us by us” (Barker, 2000, p8) and can be found in media forms such as sounds, images, books and television shows (ibid.). In this essay, I will explain the concept of representation, how it is used in media, culture, society and analyse how it is used to represent race in an episode of Doctor Who (BBC, 1963 – Present) titled ‘Rosa’.

There are multiple arguments which focus on how the media contributes to society and our cultural environments. One argument suggests that the media are the ‘constructors’ of society as the content they broadcast influences and shapes it (Hodkinson, 2017, p4). Another argument contrasts with it and suggests that the media ‘mirrors’ society and the occurrences, behaviours, values and social relations that are included with it (ibid.). Hodkinson states that these arguments are simplistic in their extreme forms and describes a third argument. He states that an improvement would be to see the relationship between the media and society as ‘a circular one’ which contains elements of both arguments (2017, p5). Therefore, the media constructs, influences and mirrors it. The content the media presents may be inspired by real events or set cultural values in society, but the media producers choose what they include and how they are presented. This forms what are manufactured representations (ibid.). This may be the reason why cultural and societal issues such as gender, class and especially race have become more prominent in our media, such as Doctor Who, as these issues have become more prominent in the public eye recently in western cultures, such as with the rise of Black Lives Matter, a new civil rights movement which started after the killing of an unarmed black teenager during 2012 (Day, Online, 2015). The episode, ‘Rosa’, specifically deals with the issues of racial inequality between white people and people of colour and the event which started the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott, while representing minority non-white races as victims. This episode mirrors today’s western society in some aspects through the main characters as the audience can relate to them. They and most of the audience share the same values and opinions of racism and inequality because they are from a contemporary western culture where these issues are considered discriminatory. The episode also influences society through its representation of minorities being the victims and the white people of the southern states being the oppressors. It depicts Rosa Parks as being a hero when she protests standing up for white people to sit on the bus. This pushes the narrative of racism being awful and disgusting in contemporary western culture and advocating for equality between races. It also influences society as it furthers the discussion in the media and society about these issues as seen when it received praise from audiences and it started discussions of racism again (BBC News, Online, 2018).

The codes and signs that make up representations of things and people, and therefore, meaning, are not universal and may not be interpreted the same way by every culture. Representations are specific to individual cultures and are manufactured, but by a cultures history, system of codes, conventions, signs and values (Strinati, 2004, p97-8) (Hodkinson, 2017, p59). Therefore, one piece of media produced by and shown to one culture may not be fully understood by another due to the differences in these elements. Take, for example, the bus protest scene, where Rosa refuses to give up her seat for white passengers. In this scene, Rosa defies the white man who is driving the bus. When she is arrested by Montgomery police, footage is intentionally slow motion for a more powerful effect and Soul music, which is culturally significant in black culture, rose with the civil rights movement and helped ‘black pride’ (Verney, 2000, p79-80), can be heard as Rosa’s arrest and escort off the bus takes place called Rise Up with the lyrics “I’ll rise up, I’ll rise up unafraid” which represents Rosa as bravery in the historical event, but also how she impacted the civil rights movement. In contemporary western culture, the representation of Rosa is one of a brave and heroic black woman who stood up to racism and segregation in the name of equality and civil rights. The scene was praised and seen as beautiful to audiences as seen by tweets posted by audience members (BBC News, Online, 2018). However, if this scene was shown to the population of the southern states in the 1950s before Rosa’s protest, there would be outrage from the white majority and it would be treated as propaganda. This would be because the western culture in the fifties and western culture today share different codes, conventions, signs and values which affect how representations are interpreted.

Stereotyping is heavily connected to representation and acts as a representational practise. Like representations, stereotypes can be about anyone or anything. An individual, group of people or other entity will be comprised of several detailed characteristics. Stereotypes take the characteristics that are memorable, simple to understand and widely recognised and reduce something or someone to those traits while also exaggerating and simplifying them (Hall, 2013, p247). Throughout western culture, there have been stereotypes developed about people of colour that have also made their way into the media. Hodkinson speaks of this, stating that several stereotypes of non-whites were developed during the days of slavery and colonialism including non-whites are lazy, irrational, animalistic, uncivilised, childlike, ignorant and buffoons (2017, p222-5). However, in the episode, some of these stereotypes are present, but are reversed to represent the white people of Montgomery. This reversal of stereotypes can be observed several times. For example, when the protagonists arrive in Montgomery, Ryan picks up a glove a woman dropped. He approaches the woman but is slapped in the face by the woman’s white husband for doing this simple kind act. The man’s actions, tone of voice and body language play a part to represent him as an easily angered, racist, animalistic, irrational and uncivilised person. Later in the episode when the protagonists are in a restaurant, they are kicked out when a white waitress tells Ryan that they “don’t serve your kind”, turns to Yasmin Khan, another main protagonist and person of Pakistani descent, and continues to say “or Mexicans.” This moment represents white people in Montgomery as ignorant. This behaviour continues throughout the episode and is embedded into the verbal language the white people of Montgomery use for people of colour. This is heard when the Montgomery police officer refers to non-whites as ‘mongrels’. The white people of Montgomery are represented as the villains and oppressors. Meanwhile, the people of colour are represented as the victims of the era where an ignorant majority white population and ruling class create an ideological social authority and hegemonic power struggle which the episode attempts to focus on. The Doctor identifies this at the end of the episode, stating that the situation of segregation, inequality and civil rights is “a struggle” as she explains that even though Rosa Parks started a successful boycott and rise of the civil rights movement, life got harder for her after the protest she performed on that bus. Throughout the episode, this struggle is seen in minor and severe cases in violence towards people of colour from verbal abuse, physical abuse and even mentions murder based on facts. Near the beginning of the episode, Rosa Parks mentions a young black man called Emmet Till who was lynched and murdered in Mississippi before the events where the episode takes place for simply talking to a white woman. This violent act mentioned in the episode was a factual event (History, Online, 2010). It is clear that this struggle for civil rights the episode focuses on and represents as such has had clear impacts today in regards to race relations in contemporary society. Stereotypes in the episode are easily flipped in the episode which is targeted to a progressive contemporary audience who consider inequality and racism as evil. Therefore, these stereotypes suggest ‘‘race’ and racism are more about signification than about biology’’ (Storey, 2012, p171) in societies and cultures.

In this essay, I have analysed how race and race relations in 1950s western culture are represented in Doctor Who’s ‘Rosa’ from the perspective of contemporary western society. I have explained how the media and society influence each other through representations, how representations are culturally specific to the culture they’re developed in, and finally, how stereotypes are developed and used in society and the media. White people, even though they are not the majority of the population, are seen as the ‘norm’ in society and media, but are the ‘dominant colour’ in terms of power and ‘exist outside categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity (Storey, 2012, p183-4). Meanwhile, people of colour have race and ethnicity. This assists in the creation of difference and racism. As Storey states, “This will always be the case until whiteness is widely recognised as just the sign of another ethnicity (ibid.)”.

Bibliography

Barker, C (2000) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, London: Sage Publications.

BBC News (2018) ‘Doctor Who: Why Has the Rosa Parks Episode Got People Talking?’, Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-45939324 (Accessed on 5/5/19).

Day, E (2015) ‘#BlackLivesMatter: The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement’, The Guardian, Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement (Accessed on 5/5/19).

Doctor Who Series 11 (2018), BBC [Blu-Ray], UK: 2 Entertain Video.

Hall, S (2013) ‘The Spectacle of the ‘Other’’ in Evans, J, Hall, S & Nixon, S (eds) 2nd Edition Representation, London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Healy, P & Mele, C (2016) ‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence. Trump Wasn’t Happy.’, The New York Times, Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/us/mike-pence-hamilton.html (Accessed on 5/5/19).

History (2010) ‘Emmet Till is Murdered’, Available at: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till (Accessed 6/5/19).

Hodkinson, P (2017) Media, Culture and Society, 2nd Edition, London: Sage Publications.

Storey, J (2012) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 6th Edition, Harlow: Pearson.

Strinati, D (2004) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, 2nd Edition, Oxon: Routledge.

Verney, K (2000) Black Civil Rights in America, Oxon: Routledge.

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About the Creator

Nathan Allan

A student at the University of Sunderland studying film and media. I'm interested in a whole lot of things. I'd appreciate it if you stick around and read some of my articles on a variety of things!

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