4 years since Doctor Who and Race and the fans are chatting about the possible race and gender of the next Doctor. It’s a conversation that was minimal in the past and has grown into the genuine world-wide conversation we have now. What we see @bbcdoctorwho is just the twitter tip of the social media iceberg.
Category Archives: Visualising race
Why the jelly babies?
Here’s why the cover of Doctor Who and Race features an image of jelly babies in a white paper bag:
[Doctor Who‘s] consistency in what humanity looks like constructs human diversity as an unremarkable and timeless fact. It casts racist attitudes as threatening, but in the grand scheme of human history, anomalous. The urge to a cosmopolitanism of “many colours one culture” is thus naturalized and essentialized. There are no deep power relations; there is only eternal humanity, different in colour but united in all other respects. This is no melting pot, it is no salad bowl. The appropriate metaphor comes from Doctor Who’s most famous foodstuff: humanity is so many coloured jelly babies inside a colourless (white) paper bag.
– quote from a 2010 paper published by Lindy Orthia in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, p. 215
Photo by Lindy Orthia
Doctor Who and Race 