What's interesting about this is the sequence in "Thin Ice" is a very pointed commentary on *exactly this.*

Directly before this, the Doctor (a straight, old, white man) lectures his younger woman of colour companion on not the importance of not reacting to racism with violence. https://twitter.com/RefinedMicrobe/status/1293500262800330753

The joke is that the Doctor as a straight, white, older guy is privileged and insulated from Bill Pott’s experience, and so him lecturing her is grossly hypocritical.

Him then punching the racist is *also* hypocritical, but less so than not punching a racist.

It’s very pointed.

As ever, the Moffat era is explicitly engaging with the privilege the Doctor has enjoyed as a straight white guy at the centre of the narrative.

It’s a pointed echo of the Tenth Doctor’s obnoxious dismissal of Martha’s unease at being a black woman in Elizabethian London.

See also: “Hell Bent” as a pointed critique of the Doctor’s mindwipe of Donna in “Journey’s End”, “A Good Man Goes to War” as a full-blown deconstruction of the whole “Ongoing Storm” schtick.

It’s just how the Moffat era works.

The Moffat era in general, and the Twelfth Doctor’s era in particular, repeatedly and consciously interrogates the ways in which the Doctor’s privilege works and the consequences that flow from that.

The punch in “Thin Ice” is very pointedly a part of that.