nayrring

I do ultimately have the view that you can enjoy things while acknowledging terrible aspects of them.  I don’t believe we have to throw Lord of the Rings out, just that we should “understand the author’s prejudices, and be mindful of how they affect his work.” But again I’m white, so this issue isn’t really as painful/visceral for me.

 But yeah it’s just……. Lotr is about the good quote “white-skins” from the English-coded countries of “the west”  fighting the quote  “least lovely Mongol types” and “black men like half-trolls” and “slant-eyed foreigners” and Asian-coded easterlings/African-coded Haradrim of the sinister “East…” I know people like to twist themselves into knots trying to explain how it’s Secretly Not Racist (even though it obviously is) but it’s horrible that there’s clearly a reason so many people on the far-right see Lord of the Rings as something that validates their awful awful worldviews. It’s ultimately a story about the Good White People from the West vs the evil POC from the East. The speeches about the glory of the West wouldn’t be out of place in videos by vicious monsters like Jordan Peterson

And I know that some of the racial coding on the heroes is ambiguous in the book (like Sam) but I hate it when that’s used as a way for people to pretend Lord of the Rings “secretly isn’t racist at all.” Like, Sam is described as brown, and you can make a convincing argument that Tolkien intended for him to be a POC– but Sam is the pale white Frodo’s lower-class servant who literally calls Frodo his master. A couple characters possibly being POC doesn’t fix the huge overarching problems with the insidious way Tolkien used racial coding (white/fair= good, hero, wealthy; brown= evil, villainous, lower-class, servant, shady). It’s not a problem of a couple characters or just “not enough representation,” it’s a problem with Lord of the Rings on a deep thematic level.

Side note: I do think the racism in the Peter Jackson films is different from the racism in the books, but I am also very wary of this Thing I occasionally see where people act like the PJ films were the ones that created all the racism…… the PJ films deserve every ounce of criticism they receive on the way they handled race, but the books do as well, and I’m uncomfortable when people bring up the racism in the pj films specifically only to downplay, excuse, or flat-out deny the racism in the books. Even if a lot is different the overarching problems with the horrible racist coding in the films have their origins in the overarching problems with the racism/racist coding Tolkien wrote.

It’s a problem with literal racial cariacatures like Ghan-Buri-Ghan, and all the times when Tolkien uncritically portrays colonialism as a thing that was ultimately Fine while portraying the people who fight back against their colonizers as Deeply Misguided at best (the Wild Men joining Saruman because they don’t understand that the Rohirrim who colonized them are Good Actually.) And thematic things like the way the book ends with the Shire closing its borders to anyone who isn’t of their race, and this being portrayed as a good decision. earlier Tolkien says “the wide world is about you– you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out” but in the end the Shire just fences the world out, fences out all the foreigners and immigrants, and this is portrayed as the Right solution to their problems. (Honestly I HATE this plot point so much! It also is a clear example of what I was saying about how the racism/xenophobia is hypocritical…the plot point where the Shire fences the world out makes no sense with the overarching idea that “you cannot forever fence the world out.” Tolkien was so busy being xenophobic he didn’t notice it contradicted the themes of his own book)

I really hate how that hypocrisy really is at the center of Lord of the Rings– the hypocrisy of preaching love and kindness while at the same time coding the villains as POC and coding the heroes white, the hypocrisy of trying to be a critique of fascism/the industrialization of war while using imagery that fascists love and agree with.

I’m not going to throw Lord of the Rings away, because I imprinted on to it when I was a Child and it’s incredibly important to me. I especially need Lord of the Rings now, because it helps me get through times of stress! But I do think that part of adulthood is realizing that you can’t love anything “purely”  and it’s okay to have complicated relationships with the things you care deeply about. I also think that if your love for something is so shallow that it shatters under the realization that it’s deeply flawed, you might not have actually loved it that much to begin with.