I’m picking this argument apart for Frodo
I absolutely love the Lord of the Rings books and trilogy.
Have I participated in one of the fabled marathons? Twice. Do I have a notebook with a map of Middle Earth as its cover? You betcha. Is there a stack of memes from this movie as high as Mount Doom on my phone? Of course!
All this to say, I’m a nerd for this world (heck, I hinted at that in my author description for the website). So when I saw a liberal professor making up some asinine reason to trash J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, I viewed it as fighting words.
There’s a class offered at the University of Nottingham in England titled “Decolonizing Tolkien et al” (you can already see where this is going). In this sham of a class, Dr. Onyeka Nubia accuses Tolkien of engaging in “ethnic Chauvinism,” pitting people of color as the “the natural enemy of the white man” in a display of “anti-African antipathy.”
LOS ANGELES – FEBRUARY 22: (L-R) Actors John Rhys-Davies, Bernard Hill, Liv Tyler, Billy Boyd, John Noble, Andy Serkis, and Sean Astin pose backstage with their awards for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture for “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” during the 10th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on February 22, 2004 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Specifically, Nubia highlights the bad guys in the world as generally being dark-skinned.
When this word salad is translated into normal words, the idea is that Tolkien was using his books to paint all people of color as evil and all white people as the superior race.
While the mental gymnastics to get to this point is super impressive, it doesn’t make any sense.
The two groups mentioned in the article as having dark skin are depicted as evil, and then the Orcs obviously have darker skin. That’s because they lived in regions of Middle Earth with warmer climates, where people with darker skin tend to live. Tolkien also wasn’t a white supremacist who pushed those themes in his literature, so maybe we can pipe down the narrative that he used his fiction to spew “anti-African antipathy?”
Admittedly, either position is based more on theory (though the progressive one is stupid). But in a more concrete way, the origin of the Orcs makes Nubia’s argument null and void.
Orcs’s character supposedly showed that Tolkien loved “ethnic Chauvinism” and hated people of color. However, the Orcs were once Elves who gave themselves to evil and became deformed. The funny part? All Elves are depicted as White.
Looks like your skin color doesn’t automatically make you good or bad, kind of like in real life.
One bright user also highlighted the irony of progressives equating Orcs to people of color.
Damn!
Tolkien makes it very clear in his books that evil is not determined by your skin color, but by choice. Wicked characters exist across the spectrum of people groups in the books and movies.
People really need to stop making insane judgments on historical books based on made-up modern issues.
That professor clearly has an agenda. He should sit this one out.
Read the full article here
