[InklingElf]

I found an article about this topic here:Tolkien,Racism,& Paranoia

Tolkien, Racism, & Paranoia
A strong argument can be made that the single most radical separation between American culture and our European roots is the elimination of class (or caste) structure. The concept of a class-free society is a more powerful call to social reform than the abstracts of "freedom" and "liberty," and creates even greater and farther-flung demands on social institutions than the Bill of Rights.

The Declaration of Independence expresses this radical revision of social structure with a simple phrase, "that all men are created equal." Notice the use of the adjective, "equal," rather than the adverb, "equally." This means that men are not just created in the same fashion, and thus may undergo subsequent change to suit society's needs, nor that we simply enjoy some sort of shared brotherhood of progeny.

The use of "equal" means that each man is inherently, permanently equal to all other men. This concept was so mind-bogglingly foreign to our own culture that even after two centuries of hard work, we're still trying to work out all that it means. At the time, indeed, we didn't really mean it -- we meant all free men (and not women). Even now, there are unspoken limitations: all men and women who are legally of age and haven't committed a felony or been declared legally insane.

Regardless, in terms of a government-supported socioeconomic state, America has never had a true caste system in place. We had slavery and the subjugation of women, but that's not nearly the same thing. A working caste system is blind to all properties of the individual except birth. It doesn't really care about race, gender, money, education, etc. It provides security and dictates action; it is inexorable and hereditary; it is supported by the same individuals which it entraps and to which it dictates. A caste system isn't just a general agreement to allow a social injustice. Indeed, it would be a little too arrogantly American of me to spout off about how caste systems are an "injustice" at all. Almost all countries older than a few centuries have had them, and many still have them today.

So let me set morality aside (well, you know what I mean), and focus on something that has to do with the title of this article. Having a caste-free society, Americans are handicapped when it comes to interpreting literature from caste or class societies. We try to understand the idea that a person's birth could dictate their job, their economic and political status, their self-image, and the relationships to all other people, but we fail miserably. Instead, we can only extrapolate from our understanding of discrimination: racial, gender-based, and economic. As a consequence, we view all castes as evil, and caste-oriented discussion as racist, sexist, and/or rich vs. poor.

Take slavery, for instance. There isn't a race on the planet that has avoided being and owning slaves. Ancient Greek and Roman slaves came from every country that then existed, and after buying one's own freedom, a member of any race could purchase slaves in Greek and Roman markets. Blacks and Asians and Caucasians and Hispanics and Arabs and Inuit have all bought and sold each other at one point or another in time.

But you say "slave" to a contemporary American, and they'll think only of whites -- excuse me, Southern whites -- owning African-born blacks. As a consequence, "slavery" is incorrectly considered a racial, rather than classicist, issue. Frankly, Americans are kind of strange in regarding slavery through such a narrow focus. Egyptian slaves, for example, were treated well, received a salary, and even held the first-ever workers strike when their elephant garlic cloves were cut from their guaranteed wages. Many aboriginal slaves actually had arrangements similar to the American (and white) sharecropper's, working on fields and getting paid with a percentage of the harvest. But when Americans talk about slavery, it's a horror of chains and rape and white people abusing black people.

Which is not to say -- heaven forbid! -- that white American slave owners weren't horribly abusive to black slaves and that this is an incredibly awful thing. It is. It's just not the definition everyone in the world has for slaves or other caste structures.

In fact, the reason Americans in particular treated their slaves so poorly may well be that there was no "cushion" of an established caste system to encourage people away from abuses. Ancient Grecian slave-owners, for example, could get into trouble for abusing a slave, and had certain duties towards the slave if the slave became ill, or pregnant. American slaves weren't treated as a caste, they were simply property, and thus the level of depravity some slave owners exhibited knew no bounds.

Such is liberal guilt, and such is American confusion regarding the social -- not racial -- aspects of classicism, that we've become waaaay too quick to see racism in anything. So it's inevitable, I suppose, that J. R. R. Tolkien, a highly class-conscious author, is now being accused of racism.

One of the most prominent "accusers" is Dr. Stephen Shapiro, an American prof at Warwick University in the United Kingdom. His argument pretty much mimics everyone else's:

Tolkien's good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde....Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups....For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups....For today's film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies may well rest on racist codes.

Now, putting aside that you should never trust anyone who pretends to know what someone else wants when they haven't said so, we can see that this argument projects American notions about caste structures. Basically, he's taken a story that requires an understanding of multiple levels of classes, and forced it into the American duality of white vs. black, slave-owner vs. slave.

The Lord of the Rings does not present us with a homogenized white society being invaded by evil black men. Instead, we have the race of men, the race of elves, the race of dwarves, and the race of hobbits, along with wizards, goblins, orcs (who are ex-elves), and various other magical creatures, including the venerable tree guardians.

As an American myself, I'm not going to be too good at "assigning" these races to various British classes, but with Tolkien's own guidance, I can assume that the hobbits represent the British peasant, the people whom Tolkien most admired in the world for their sense of duty and hard work, their self-confidence and loyalty, their intelligence and their beauty. The elves seem to stand for the old ways of the British aristocracy: the absolute monarchs, princes and dukes who once ruled the land. Or they may be those valiant knights on noble quests. Men stand for the new, more democratic rulerships. Dwarves sort of seem to be factory workers and hard laborers, and those old tree guardians seem at once to be old men sitting around a gentleman's club and representations of the will of the people -- slowly raised, but deadly in their ultimate power.

The good guys in the story are not racially segregated, but representative of various types of social structures. In fact, the good guys' race is incidental, because the "bad guys" in the story are not another race. Sauron is an evil wizard, not a foreigner, and the orcs are elves who were tortured out of their minds and souls until nothing but empty husks remain. They're "black" in the story not because torture somehow robbed the elves of their Caucasianess, but because they're burnt by hellfire and have become creatures of the night. As for the "slant-eyed" thing, well the eyes are the windows to the soul, and the fact that today we use more PC terms "shifty-eyed" and "beady-eyed" doesn't mean we get to point fingers at a years-dead author for not knowing the term "slant-eyed" would one day become offensive.

Charges regarding Tolkien's "racism" are so easy to deflect, in fact, that the truly interesting thing to be learned from such comments as Shapiro's has little to do with the author, and everything to do with us. In our desire to live out the promise that "all men are created equal," Americans haven't been content with abolishing slavery and letting women vote, we go out of our way to admire the success of those whose birth held no privileges. We jeer at the abuses of the wealthy and pass laws against discrimination based on religious, sexual, and physical considerations.

Currently, we're engaged in a somewhat bitter battle of attitude. While many people view this as the ultimate step -- doing away with the cultural and social biases reminiscent of inequality -- others have been complaining that taking up arms against people's thoughts is going too far. Being PC means eliminating even the appearance of discrimination, and, as every good reader of Tolkien knows, appearances can be deceiving.

When we Americans look at everything for its potential "racism," we have crossed over from vigilance into paranoia. Worse yet, we're wasting energy that could be so much better used against real instances of discrimination. If people want to find racist literature to vilify, there's plenty to choose from. Going after the works of a man whose epic champions the strength of "the little guy," and who often wrote of the evils of apartheid and racism, smacks of an academic who's just trying to get noticed and an American who really needs to end his witch-hunt and remember that other countries don't write literature based on uniquely American sins.