You think you've read drivel? You haven't read drivel until you've read this

[mindil]

The thing to remember is that in the pre-1960s, no one thought they had a capacity or responsibility to influence society to be less racist. Tolkien has his famous philo-semitic letter to show that he wasn't antisemitic, and if he could rise above that most endemic of European racisms, it's likely his attitude toward people of color was also liberal for his time.

But even if he condemned racism, he would have thought, along with all whites (I can't vouch for non-whites) that there was nothing he could do to change others' attitudes. There was no notion of symbolism in the arts influencing people's attitudes one way of the other. Realism, of course, was influential. Uncle Tom's Cabin could improve things. Pygmalion could improve things between the classes. Robinson Crusoe was thought to be enlightened. I suppose there were racist stories that haven't stood the test of time that were thought to be detrimental.

But if you didn't want to be directly polemical, your words were understood to be inert socially and politically. So White and Black as the most ancient of symbols for Good and Evil was "known" to have no implications whatsoever for real world whites and blacks.

Coming from a mindset where casting white and black that way had no chance of reinforcing racism in others allowed non-racists like Tolkien to use that trope with no conflict of conscience. Real swarthy people were as good or bad as his liberal mind chose to think them, and swarthy Haradrim were as good or evil as his creative imagination chose to fashion them. And that's it. No crossover.

Crossover, lit-crit thinking has taught people to find influences in every symbol, which may have made us more susceptible to those symbols. And maybe we were always susceptible to them. But using them, in Tolkien's era, was only a sign of classical imagery, not racist ideology.

As an aside, I suspect that Tolkien did not envision many people of color reading his legendarium. The UK was less diverse in his time, the US didn't interest him much, English speakers elsewhere were white or English was their second language. And his story was meant to be a mythology for England, after all. He probably just didn't think about how dark-skinned readers might feel reading about the white good guys vs the swarthy bad guys. If the whites could enjoy the story without being made more racist, then why not go with the classic white/black dichotomy?

[mindil]

Sorry guys, I couldn't figure out how to edit the post to put in lines between paragraphs, so I reposted. I won't do that again.

[Boromir88]

Originally Posted by mindil

Sorry guys, I couldn't figure out how to edit the post to put in lines between paragraphs, so I reposted. I won't do that again.

Bottom right corner of the post you like to delete there is an edit button.

When you click Edit there will also be an option to delete the post.

Welcome to the Forum! Enjoy death with the rest of us :-)

[Galadriel55]

I very much agree with Mindil (and welcome to the Downs!). The Haradrim and Easterlings are not bad or evil or immoral, they are unknown people who by chance of fortune not known to us ended up fighting on the side of Sauron. This is in contrast to the Black Numenorians who settled in those lands, who clearly knew better and yet chose corruption over kindness. So if Tolkien were to be condemning a real world phenomenon, it would be the colonization of unknown cultures and countries, not the races themselves. But that is all unintentional extrapolation; Tolkien never had in mind to convince anyone for or against some racial view or colonization debate, his purpose was entirely elsewhere.