diversehighfantasy:

tillthenexttimedoctor:

Has anyone read any – positive or negative – takes on “Rosa” by black fans or black writers? I‘d be interested in reading posts or articles (or seeing twitter threads or youtube videos) that aren’t just white people telling each other that the episode was great.

I thought it was a great episode, much more detailed and historically accurate than I expected. I do wish it had mentioned Claudette Colvin’s part of the story, as the one who ignighted the bus boycott with her previous, less peaceful, arrest and conviction.

I’ve read a lot of white criticism of the episode on Reddit and Twitter over the last couple days, and while many posts say they don’t like being spoon fed a story, an equal amount missed major points that shouldn’t have needed to have been even more spelled out. For example, Rosa was clearly portrayed as an activist in the inner circle of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr wasn’t at her house randomly because all Black people know each other – they were meeting.

And yet I keep seeing people complaining that Rosa was “misrepresented” because she was in reality an activist. Or that she was “chosen” as the face of the movement, as if she was a puppet and not an active participant herself. (Which really goes to show how nonblack people will twist information in order to put it in a bad light – a lot of people seem to think that because she was an activist, the whole thing was faked. That’s misrepresentation).

Another pain point I’ve seen is the time traveling villain, whose name I don’t even remember. Scruffy white guy sent back in time to stop the bus boycott. His motivation? Racism. So why are so many complaining he had no motivation? And why is racism considered a “boring” trait for a sci-fi villain? Especially since when I post about racism in media and fandom, people act like it’s the most over the top suggestion (because racism is something only Evil People do)? There’s nothing worse when someone thinks they’re being called racist, but when a mass murdering villain is openly racist, that’s not a good reason to be a villain.

I won’t even get into the people who wanted to “understand” the white space villain better. Or the ones who call him a dumb villain because he’s from the far future, and obviously racism wouldn’t be a thing in his time (or maybe racism is something that isn’t exclusive to the US in the ‘50s? Maybe it’s not just going to go away by itself over time?). Like, no stopping and thinking about the implications, just, no, there’s no racism in whatever future world this villain we just met came from.

Which, of course, goes hand in hand with complaints that Ryan and Yaz’s talk about the racism they’ve experienced in the present day UK was unnecessary and “heavy handed.” It was absolutely necessary for a British show exploring an American civil rights event to do that.

Anyway. Episode was great. A lot of the reactions, not so much.