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Each time The Doctor regenerates, there is speculation as to who the actor will be. And each time the speculative lists include both women and non-white actors. However, The Doctor has so far always been played by white male actors.

We already have a question regarding The Doctor's gender. But is there any in-universe restriction on The Doctor's race?

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2 Answers2

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Unless there's something unstated particular to The Doctor, there are no known restrictions. The Corsair has canonically changed between male and female during regeneration. Let's Kill Hitler and The Death of the Doctor both canonically reference changing skin color.

It should also be noted that under common usage, "white" is a social construct, which has sometimes excluded e.g. Irish people. But many of the uncontroversially-proposed Doctors have been ethnically Irish, and one Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, had an Irish mum. So there's no plausible reason they can't have a non-white Doctor.

Euan M
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    According to which definition is "Irish" not white? – Lightness Races in Orbit Jun 29 '15 at 20:05
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    @Lightness Races in Orbit The reference is to the beliefs of some bigotted WASPS before the late 20th century. See for example http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095 – Michael Stern Sep 21 '15 at 15:03
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    @MichaelStern: That looks like an Americanism to me, starting with the sentence "In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin" and ending with the implication that this problem of the "Irish" not being deemed "white" was one of Irish immigrants to the New World. As such, I'm not sure what bearing it has on Doctor Who... :) Though speaking broadly I take the point. – Lightness Races in Orbit Sep 21 '15 at 16:09
  • @Lightness Races in Orbit you are correct that the book I linked to is about the U.S. The phenomenon may exist elsewhere, perhaps manifesting differently as the obsession with white/black itself may be stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere. – Michael Stern Sep 21 '15 at 18:00
  • I think my point is that as far as I'm aware the Irish have never been deemed "non-white" in the country of Doctor Who's origin. Therefore I'm not buying this answer's rationale. – Lightness Races in Orbit Sep 21 '15 at 18:02
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    Infamously, some London pubs used to have signs saying "No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish". @Lightness Races in Orbit Some of these signs might even have survived until the 1970s. – Euan M Dec 04 '15 at 04:03
  • @CreationEdge In the UK, it is much less common. We have fewer hyphenated identities. If someone self-identifies as X, it is impolite to state they are Y. By all means, explicitly reference parentage. But ethnicity, identity and nationality are all at play here. – Euan M Dec 04 '15 at 04:15
  • The essence of our disagreement is that I am using British cultural traditions of the heritability of nationality/ethnicity/identity, which seems the most appropriate to use of a Brit in a British show. In counter to your claim (and the answerer's) that having a single parent of nationality/ethnicity/identity X necessarily makes you X in any of those axes of orthogonality. Tbh, I suspect the original answerer just isn't very good at distinguishing accents. – Euan M Dec 04 '15 at 04:36
  • @EuanM Indeed but that's not the same as calling Irish non-white – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 04 '15 at 10:40
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No. Time Lords can change race.

We see River Song regenerate from White to Black to White again in series 6.

River Song

Additionally, in The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor, the Doctor states that his race was not limited to white; he "can be anything." However, he also says that he can regenerate 507 times, so he could be joking.

Finally, Black actor Ncuti Gatwa was announced as the next Doctor in 2022.

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