John Snow said:
Paying attention to what books say is not an invention of political correctness or of the modern era. However, assuming that every minor plot point in a book is profoundly significant IS.
Nice strawman there John! What I am doing is making a very specific argument about how Tolkien writes about non-white people.
Literary people need something to write about. If they just accepted that the racist subtext in Tolkien's books isn't really there, what would literature PhD candidates write their theses about?
So, anyone who is paid to write something can’t be trusted? I’ll just leave this argument aside for now. Well, in that case, I’m safe. I’m basing my conclusions solely on reading the words written in the books and I’m not being paid a cent.
Following your line of thought, the Elric stories are clearly an indictment of albinos.
I haven’t read these stories so I cannot say.
Gieven that most medieval societies WERE sexist, is it sexist to portray that?
No. You will note I’m not suggesting that LOTR is sexist. I’m suggesting it is racist.
I don't particularly think so. I'd argue you can learn more about Tolkien's opinion about women by looking at what Eowyn DOES do than at how many women characters exist in the books.
I agree. What matters is how an identity group is portrayed overall, not how frequently they appear in the book. I did not, for instance, agree with Jackson’s decision to enlarge Arwen’s part.
Just because I'm saying the stories don't have the theme, subtext, and metatext you claim they do doesn't mean they don't have any.
Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Now, perhaps, we can have an intelligent discussion about the words Tolkien wrote and what we can glean from them.
It does mean I find it simplistic to read racism into the story simply because of its presentation of some characters as villains who are "swarthy" or "dark"
So, you see absolutely nothing significant in the fact that every single time any non-white human character is mentioned in LOTR, Tolkien tells his readers that they are evil?
Given that Tolkien could have made all the humans in the books as white as Aragorn, why do you think he chose to include non-white people? Perhaps if you offered an alternate theory of why the author might be choosing to include non-white characters, you might convince me of your views.
Especially when two of the central characters overcome the racism and prejudice of their own societies to become fast friends.
Indeed. Some kinds of prejudice are bad in Tolkien’s view. But what I am talking about is how Tolkien portrays members of racial groups that actually exist not whether he is racist towards groups that do not exist at all.
And all of these really significant villains are part of Sauron's faceless hordes.
That’s not the case. Take the guy in Bree. Take the Mouth of Sauron.
Why don’t you offer an alternate theory of why Tolkien chose to make the humans who served Sauron mostly non-white whereas the humans who fought against him were all white?
Unless you're going to attach significance to the symbolism of the color black.
No. I’m attaching significance (not symbolism) to the fact that the areas of the map that are analogues of Central Asia and Africa are populated by non-white people who follow Sauron.
In which case you're attaching racist significance to the school of thought that bad things come from dark places.
No. I’m attaching significance to the fact that people who are described as “dark-skinned,” “swarthy,” or “slant-eyed” are all evil in Tolkien’s works. Every single one of them. To a man.
There are other examples I could give, like Saruman (the White) being one of the chief villains. Or the central role of Denethor in furthering Sauron's aims (a white male of the same race as Aragorn, but less lineage).
This isn’t news. I state the same thing in my original post. I’m not arguing 100% of the villains are non-white. That’s patently untrue. What I’m arguing is that 100% of the non-whites are villains.
There's plenty of subtext about the conflict between nature and technology, the danger of pride, the perils of playing god and so forth. There's mythological significance to things like "Men of the West"
Yes. And how they fell because of miscegenation. Nothing racist apparently about preaching the evils of race mixing and blaming the destruction of a whole society (Arnor) on it.
"the land in the East" or even that Sauron's minions came from the South. All of that is embedded in centuries of European mythology. Maybe you can argue that those myths themselves are racist, and you might be right.
Because Tolkien’s books are not 100,000 pages long, they do not include all beliefs held by premodern Europeans at all historical moments. Tolkien has selectively deployed a number of images and ideas from our premodern past. I think it is perfectly legitimate to form opinions about which ideas from the past he has included in his books and which he has excluded.
So I ask, does drawing on those myths make someone racist?
It can. Yes. If I am writing a book based on American cinema and I choose to make
Birth of a Nation a major source for thematic elements and ignore every movie starring Sidney Poitier then yes. My choices are racist. There are all kinds of ideas in the European past that are not merely non-racist but anti-racist such as the Saint Christopher legends, Parzifal or Greek ideas about Egypt. Tolkien is choosing, despite his novels’ otherwise medieval themes to include a bunch of early modern and Victorian ideas about race that, frankly, were not even part of the medieval European worldview. In many ways, he is imposing his own time’s conservative ideas of race on a narrative inspired by a period in which people did not think in racial terms.
Even when they're clearly writing that racism and intolerance are BAD.
I’m really not appreciating this idea that we should ignore everything Tolkien says about non-white humans because he thinks white dwarves and white elves should get along.
Prophet 2B said:
Wow... You know absolutely nothing about J.R.R. Tolkien.
I'm going to strongly recommend you go read some Tolkien biographies and some of his other works before you say anything else along these lines, because you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
The novels speak for themselves. Your argument that Tolkien’s novels cannot be racist because of things he did in his personal life is a silly way of reading his work or any work of literature for that matter.
If I see something on the page of a book that is racist. The text on the page doesn’t change because of the writer is a member of the NAACP. The text stays the same. The book’s message stays the same. What is relevant to whether LOTR is racist is the text that comprises LOTR. LOTR can’t stop being racist because of things outside of the text that comprises it.
I could spend a good hour writing up a post detailing Tolkien's critiques of racism and what he believes concerning the equality of men and women (which we can find in other sources, either by him or people who knew him, etc. - studies have been done). But I don't really have the time.
Well, if you find the time I would be most interested.
But are you really saying that every person who says, “I’m not racist,” or “I believe everyone is equal,” is therefore not racist. Because many of defenders of institutionalized racism, at least in the US, have said exactly those things. Aren’t most racist statements prefaced with the words, “I’m not racist but…”?
This is just absurd. Completely and utterly. Tolkien was the farthes thing from a sexist
That’s great. But remember I’m not calling Tolkien sexist. I’m calling him racist.
and a racist that one could possibly be. His books had absolutely nothing to do with those topics.
Books that depict racial conflict have to do with race. Books that depict men and women interacting have to do with sex and gender. Books are about the things they contain. I don’t know how a book that included both male and female characters could avoid pertaining to questions of sex and gender.
billd91 said:
Considering that the number of non-white human characters in the story about whom we know anything of substance is very small, I think you're reading WAY too much into this.
Doesn’t it seem strange to you that non-white humans appear at all? Why bother to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Sauron’s armies are full of black and Asiatic people? Most readers would just assume everyone was white if Tolkien did not specifically make mention of race.
Umbran said:
However, the problem is that since they aren't direct, literal, or explicit you cannot tell the difference between those that are placed there by the author, and those pieced together by the reader that have nothing to do with what they author thought.
I think you can. The fact is that just because literary studies is not physics doesn’t mean that any book can mean whatever its reader decides it means.
And even if one does find a subtext, we forget to include historical perspective. Let us consider one clear example: Tolkien was a sexist because he had no solid female characters.
People really want to make this an argument about sexism because then they can win. But the fact is that I agree with those who say Tolkien is not sexist. The reasoning you put forward here is not a good way to analyze a work of literature. The sexism argument is based on what isn’t in the text. My argument is about what
is in the text.
Well, LotR was first published in 1954 - by today's standards pretty much every adult American and Brit of the time (including most women) were sexist. So, criticizing him for that is rather like criticizing him for being a man of his time.
Whereas arguing that miscegenation is wrong and filling Sauron’s legions with Asians and Africans is not commensurate with the views of educated people in the era of Brown v. Board of Education.
Failure to be a visionary on a particular topic is not a valid criticism.
Agreed. But that’s not what I am saying.
