Tolkien and Racism Revisited – Again

Three new episodes of Middle-earth Talk Radio were released today, bringing the episode list up-to-date at Middle-earth Talk Radio. I could say many interesting things about these episodes but I wanted to focus on a topic that Hawke and I discussed in the last episode (Episode 39), which was recorded on November 13.

I brought up the topic of a controversial Salon article titled “If Tolkien Were Black”, in the reader comments to which were many thoughtful and passionate responses. The writer of the article, Laura Miller, has apparently earned a reputation among some readers for not treating Tolkien well. I don’t know, not having read her past articles, so I cannot comment on that. But she definitely has some ardent philosophical opponents on the Web.

For my part the article is mostly unrelated to Tolkien, although it points out the challenge facing non-white fantasy authors (or perhaps I should say fantasy authors who want to write about non-white protagonists) because American fantasy literature (and its readership) has become strongly associated with pseudo-medieval stereotypes.

Not all American fantasy fits into that mold. The late Tom Dietz, whom I had the privilege of meeting on a couple of occasions, wrote about Native American protagonists in several fantasy novels. And other authors, including C.J. Cherryh and Marion Zimmer Bradley, have also challenged some of the pseudo-medieval stereotypes (even if still drawing upon medieval traditions for inspiration).

I couldn’t help but add my voice to the discussion on the Salon article, and when the award-winning author N(ora) K. Jemisin (who is mentioned in article) discussed this on her own blog, I dropped by to say something there. Tolkien has often been accused of writing racist literature, and many of us have leaped to his defense — pointing out that he detested racism.

But there is an innate aspect to even Tolkien’s literature which while not distinctly racist nonetheless reflects a choice between cultural traditions. That is, as Hawke and I discuss in Episode 39 of Middle-earth Talk Radio, when you write “us and them” fiction someone has to be the “them”. Tolkien did not make Asians and Africans the “them” but he made imaginary Easterlings and Southrons part of the “them”. There is clear cultural iconography attached to some of these foreign forces that makes it apparent to the reader that Tolkien was indirectly associating some of the “bad guys” with historical cultures.

It has often been said that none of the good guys in The Lord of the Rings are dark-skinned — and while that complaint is far from true (no less than three distinct cultural groups on the side of “good” are said to be dark-skinned) — readers seldom associate any major characters with dark skin (some hobbits were, in fact, darker-skinned than the Numenoreans). Another fact that is often overlooked is that most of the white-skinned Numenoreans fell into evil, literally became “THE bad guys” near the end of the Second Age, and their descendants continued to serve evil throughout the Third Age.

But here’s the real issue: Readers are NOT perceiving these facts as primary aspects of the narrative. The readers are seeing the story from the viewpoint of northwest European travelers (whom the Hobbits metaphorically represent). And Tolkien himself confirmed that he was firmly planting the story in the north-west of the Old World.

Hence, it is impossible NOT to see the clear line between the “us” being the western European peoples and the “them” being everyone else. There is nothing innately wrong with composing a story that celebrates the strengths and best qualities of your cultural heritage. Such stories, in fact, are composed in all parts of the world and are told and retold for generations among all ethnic groups. But the problem for people who want to see their cultures celebrated in popular fiction is that most of those cultures are either ignored or they are conveniently downgraded to cardboard “bad guys” (much like Tolkien’s Orcs, although people familiar with my work know I have argued for complexity on their part).

This isn’t a flaw in J.R.R. Tolkien the man or his fiction. He was not racist, not writing racist propaganda. In fact, his fiction leads the reader to see the self-destructive nature of racism. Even within The Lord of the Rings you can find examples (such as the story of the Kin-strife in Gondor in the appendices) where racism or ethnic purism leads to disaster. But the problem is that these examples must be found or shared. They don’t simply leap out of the story at the reader.

Hence, while many scholarly efforts to show that Tolkien’s take on racism is both direct and sophisticated, the story fails to establish itself as an anti-racism polemic. Tolkien surely never set himself the task of writing such fiction (in fact, he probably would have regarded it as too allegorical a theme to be useful for a sequel to The Hobbit). There are anti-racist themes in the book but the book itself is not anti-racist.

Hence, those who are particularly sensitive to the walls of exclusion that racism (which is often neither deliberate nor willful) erects between “haves” and “have nots” are more likely to see the effect of racism in the influence that Tolkien’s fiction has had on modern popular fantasy literature. It was never anyone’s plan that we should come to this place — but we find ourselves here, and now we are bickering over the whys and wherefores.

I’m sure Hawke and I only touched the tip of the iceberg in our discussion. It is difficult to look at this question and not feel defensive for Tolkien’s sake, for he could not have foreseen how his literature would have helped shape the current trends in fantasy. Nor is it easy to agree with people who simply dismiss Tolkien as “a man of his times”, implying in a Chronistic way that “his times” were somehow inferior or less sophisticated than “our times”. That’s unfair to the many people of his generation (including J.R.R. Tolkien) who recognized the disagreements between cultures and the difficulties they lead to; and it’s also patronization of the worst sort, for our own generation(s) have not yet found a way to break down all the barriers and confirm the innate equality of human groups everywhere.

Diversity of opinion is one of our strengths but only when we learn to embrace that diversity and appreciate how much it has to teach us about who we are, where we come from, and how we can improve ourselves. The questions about racism in The Lord of the Rings won’t go away; nor will any of the answers people offer for them be either definitive or universally satisfying, at least not for a very long time.

So while I invite you to download and to ALL the episodes of Middle-earth Talk Radio, I hope you’ll listen to Episode 39.

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