All of Time and Space…and you can’t see why it’s dangerous to bring a Black woman back in time

[bcbgrl33]

Alright here's another rant that is an extension of The Shakespeare Code and also Human Nature Family of Blood and Season 3 in general of Doctor Who: Blacks and time travel. Here you have a 900 year old Time Lord whose business it is to see and travel around all of Time and Space... yet still can't see why it's dangerous to bring a Black Woman back

Comments

[persiflage_1]

To a certain extent, at least in the first trip (in TSC) I can see the Doctor not getting the colour issue - after all, he's not actually human, so there's no reason, particularly because he hasn't travelled with a person of colour before, why he should realise why Martha's concerned - probably, to a Time Lord, it's a human foible.

There's no excuse for him dumping them in Farringham in 1913, though, except that RTD wanted Paul Cornell to adapt "Human Nature", and he opted for him to do it in S3, instead of S1, S2 or S4 - because RTD's an insensitive git!

And I doubt there were Time Lord Advisories about not travelling to Earth during a specific period - Time Lords rarely went *anywhere* before the Doctor ran away with his granddaughter and the stolen TARDIS. And AFAIK (going by TV canon at least), the Doctor was the first Time Lord to visit Earth - so there was no reason for the Academy to teach Time Lords anything about Earth's history - as far as the Time Lords are concerned, Earth is not a place worth bothering with (which I suspect is a large part of the reason that the Doctor's so enamoured with it - he is, after all, a non-conformist and a rebel).

[bcbgrl33]

That's true. There was no excuse for dumping them in 1913 and also 1930 but still downplay the racism or expected racism (that was convieniently left out of 1930s AMERICA)? RTD was an insensitive twit in regards to racial and feminist issues.

However, my main reason for this thread is that he is a Time Lord, and AFAIK-the first Time Lord to visit Earth-and that although they weren't interested in Earth, they study TIME and they probably glanced over Earth's history even if it was just touching on the surface. And the fact that the Doctor, who was so enamored with Earth, probably traveled their a lot during any era, he would have-as you stated-been aware of those "human foibles" and how they apply, even passingly to the other humans he rarely had contact with (oh yeah the ones with melanin and faced this human foible pretty severely)

He had to be purposefully blind to the problems going on and you'd think that as a TIME Lord he wold be aware. Your fics (especially you 1969 ones that I LOVE) have more racial awareness than season 3 did and that is not right at all

[persiflage_1]

I don't want to defend Rusty, because god knows, he doesn't deserve it, but my understanding of the Time Lords and their relationship to the Web of Time (and this is based on Big Finish and Classic Who as much as New Who), is that it's a very complicated situation - and that only the fixed points in a Time Line *really* stand out to a Time Lord - therefore, if he was to look at Earth's history, he'd see things like World Wars, the destruction of Pompeii, etc. which would probably shine out of the Web of Time, whereas things that aren't fixed points don't tend to show up unless the Time Lord specifically looks at a particular Time Line. And don't forget, Ten talks about Time being like a big ball of string - so he'd probably have to look really closely to see details that to us might seem huge, but to him seem small because they're not fixed points.

I picture it as looking at a really gigantic (planet-sized) ball of string - and there are points on the string that have been daubed with a spot of paint - those are the fixed points in Time. But while you can see those spots of colour, you don't tend to notice all of the string when you're looking at it - because it's such an enormous ball of string, and a lot of it isn't in plain sight because of the sheer size and scale of it, so there's plenty that's inside the tangle.

Jefferson mention

[viomisehunt]

One of the reasons it is difficult for people of color, especially here in the States, to accept the color-blind, alien excuse is that the Doctor admits to meeting people like Jefferson. If he was at Jefferson House, who did the Doctor believe was cleaning his and Jefferson's room, making his food, tending his fields? It wasn't house elves. The Doctor seen slaves in all countries and all forms, including Rome, Greece, and probably ancient Egypt and Kush.
If he was in colonial America, and had been to King George's England, the presence of slaves would have been obvious.

The Doctor tells Martha that the last time he wore the suit he was with Jefferson. He pulls out a draft of the Declaration of Independence. Did the Doctor miss the lengthy, heated, and very divisive debate as to whether or not to include the abolition of slavery into the Declaration?

What is believable is, that as an Alien, The Doctor might have believed, as people like Jefferson in the States were the ruling, intellectual class, that slavery was part of the natural order, because that is what people like Jefferson said, although he also believed the outcome of slavery as natural order is rebellion.
The Doctor might not have understood that evolution from this kind of entitled thinking took work, and resistance, and protest, and even bloody conflict (Lord knows what he thought the America Civil War was about, but up until 1774 a great deal of the US was a British Colony under British Rule, with British customs. He would have known slavery did exist in that time, and Martha could be threatened by it -- if not for the fact that she was with him. Rather than dismiss Martha's fears, he should have acknowledged, that "yes, there is slavery, and the practices are brutal and immoral, but I will not allow harm to come to You". The Elizabethan's ignorance of racial prejudice is on the same level as the ignorance about mental illness and disease, which he does speak of and should have been treated as such in the script. But to dismiss Martha's fears as foolish, or suggest that these attitudes didn't exist in 1599, makes the Doctor look even more uncaring, than even RTD may have intended.