Lord of the Rings TV series gets multi-season order at Amazon

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

You take exception? I rather take exception to the claim that seeing any non-white characters in a story that spans thousands of miles of fictional terrain, and runs from the Arctic to nearly the equator, is "arbitrarily sploodged in Diversity Ketchup", "more pumpkin spice product", and "an entirely political superimposition". I take exception to the insistence that every Good character in Tolkien must be white, because... well, because they must be, right? Tolkien would never have imagined that the Good races could include non-white people, right? Because...?

"Racism" is not a political term. It is a matter of fundamental ethics. Treating people who look different as lesser or unwanted, especially when you have social or political power over them (which answers most-to-all of your "scare-quoted" questions at the end, by the way), is wrong. Excluding them from things - yes, including playing characters in an adaptation of Tolkien - for no more reason than that you're comfortable with the way things are is wrong.

And I firmly believe Tolkien would agree with me.

I don't want to raise the temperature in here, but you are getting very close to name-calling.

Yes, it absolutely is political. One confusion of our confused and angry age seems to be the conflation of the two, the (intentional?) obfuscation of the difference between the political and the moral- because it seems more suited to the censorious contemporary mindset to say not "I disagree with you" but "I condemn you;" not "You are wrong" but "You are evil." And so the denial that the entirely political decision that People of Color need representation injected into in a work written in the 1940s by a middle-aged Englishmen is political, and is instead (and inaccurately) recast as "ethical."

Could you explain to me exactly what artistic or aesthetic enhancement is involved here? It certainly has nothing to do with "Treating people who look different as lesser or unwanted, especially when you have social or political power over them" Nobody is treating POC as "lesser or unwanted" by observing that they simply weren't there. Would you make the same argument with regard to an adaptation of David Copperfield or Pride and Prejudice or (ha!) Vanity Fair? These were books written in England from an English perspective featuring Englishmen (and -women). Tolkien was writing from the perspective of an England where just about nobody, unless they had been out to the Empire, had so much as seen a black person in the flesh until American GIs started coming over.

Tolkien was writing about "the North-West of the Old World." A place which, as he understood it (long before the Nationalities Act), was populated by Europeans. To the extent POC stepped on the stage they were, like the Easterlings and Haradrim, the Other, the hostile invaders from south and east.




Now, it would be entirely one thing If you were to come back with "You are wrong; Tolkien did not envision his world as being all-white," and argue from there. You could even attempt an argument that the work is somehow artistically improved by a multiracial cast. What you cannot legitimately do is play lazy ad hominem games and accuse me of racism (which I am not) because I do hold that opinion- nor, frankly, for mocking the current rather silly fashion for Diversity Ketchup, especially its empty claims to moral imperative.