Racism and Tolkien.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

They essay is infected by Martinez-ism. By "brown" and "swarthy" Tolkien was only referring to the more suntanned end of European coloration. ("Swarthy," for example, was often used to describe the pirate Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts - who was a Welshman).

It also contains some straight up mis-statements of fact, such as "hobbits as aborigines:" 1) Tolkien never said it, indeed it contradicts his explicit history, and 2) Tolkien of course would have been using the word literally, as he did (in draft) of Bombadil, not in reference to Australia's pre-European population.

[Faramir Jones]

Tolkien, a few years after LotR appeared, made a public denunciation of apartheid in South Africa on 5th June 1959, during his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford.

He spoke of his South African birth, and that he did 'not claim to be the most learned of those', who have come from South Africa.

But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White. (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 238)