Look, I love Tolkien as much as the next person, but we have to acknowledge that his beautiful and good characters are only white because he was working within a racist framework that upheld racist and narrow beauty standards while also indelibly linking beauty with morality.

(E.g., Saruman is no longer “white” when he becomes corrupted by Sauron and his lust for the Ring. Also consider Eöl and Maeglin... Gollum... orcs...)

To imagine that Tolkien wrote his characters as white because they “just were” is to deny the systems and policies of racism that have done violence to people of color for centuries.

Tolkien is not exempt from this because he wrote a good story. And before you say anything: yes, I know he was supposedly writing about the people of ancient England.

But please remember that ancient cultures were more diverse than we like to give them credit for; and the idea of racial whiteness was one that developed over time and wasn’t active in the medieval age and earlier as it was in Tolkien’s day.

(For more info on that, see Nell Irvin Painter’s THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE.)

All this to say: I think attempting to redeem Tolkien’s work by offering diverse representations of beauty and strength is a good and necessary project.

It forces—or at least invites—white readers of Tolkien to acknowledge the racism inherent in stories of Middle-earth, to step back and allow those who know better to speak and draw and write.

But more importantly, the project allows people of color to respond to and deconstruct the violence and racism that Tolkien’s work has made possible through its unethical and racist understanding of beauty and morality.

Tolkien was a product of his time, yes, but he also could have done better, as many people long before him had done & as people around him continued to do. If we’re going to keep insisting on Tolkien’s value & relevance we have to acknowledge that his work is less than ethical.