beccaland:runyouclevrboyandbeadoctor:I’m sorry. We have to not help her.Ow. That hurts.I…do n
beccaland:runyouclevrboyandbeadoctor:I’m sorry. We have to not help her.Ow. That hurts.I…do not see why it should hurt. Rosa did not ask for or need help in the sense of intervention. She was doing exactly what she set out to do. This is why the climactic moment of tension in the episode is not when she is actually arrested, but when, threatened with arrest, she says “You may do that.” That is the act.For me the most interesting thing in the episode’s portrayal of this moment is how the Doctor and whatsisname are forced to abandon the typical posture of Good White Person–one who intervenes to avert harm, who prevents, who mediates between the oppressed and the oppressor–and adopt the much more difficult position of co-conspirator in that they are not stopping Rosa from performing the act she has set out to commit. (If you want to bring in all the stuff they did to make sure this would happen at the appointed time, then you could see them as enablers, but I won’t get into that because it involves my very-different-from-the-show’s idea of What History Is and how it works, and it would take a lot more words). More than that, they are being forced to become the white people against whom Rosa is taking action. They are becoming involved in this situation in a way that is uncomfortable for them (”I don’t want to be part of this!”). That is one of the sophisticated and powerful things about this episode (not the only one): the confrontation of the White Ally with the inescapable complicity of whiteness and the realization that there is no comfortable, hands-clean escape that is actually helpful. (They might have felt better preventing Rosa’s arrest, but this would not be help.)So I don’t see really how the Doctor’s not intervening in this moment is any kind of contradiction. It is a fulfillment of the mission statement she made regarding help. It is a much more caring and true fulfillment of it than most of her previous iterations, who have a tendency to ride into the slap-bang center of a situation on a blast of wind and act act act, would have been capable of. -- source link
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