Tolkein and the Reality of Fantasy's Failure With Racism

          With the help of my girlfriend I have recently been rehabilitated into appreciating the fantasy genre.  Before her, my only exposure to fantasy came from Rowling and Tolkien. I had read science fiction literature too, but because I consider it a genre distinct from fantasy and because I see it less impacted by what I am to criticize in this essay, I need not mention it in any more detail.  The first book I read in my recovery of fantasy was the Silmarillion by Tolkien because I considered epic fantasy to be the essence of the genre, and I understood the Silmarillion to be the epitome of epic fantasy.

          This was a poor choice to reintroduce me to the fantasy genre because in reading it, I realized how Eurocentric and orientalist Tolkien is.  Whether this was due to my sympathy for the political revolutions of the Middle East and North Africa, or it was my interest in Islamic philosophy and theology, or my countless friendships with Muslim and Arab Americans (of which one is my girlfriend), I cannot say, though I am sure all had an influence on my reception of his epic.  In reaction I began to search out other works of great fantasy and it soon became apparent to me that much, if not most, of the literary tradition Tolkien had inspired had inherited his Eurocentric and orientalist mythology and made it essential to the fantasy genre.

          This essay is a confrontation with that legacy of fantasy which exoticizes and literally demonizes minorities and the immorality and hypocrisy involved in doing so.  I believe that this tendency can be traced back to Tolkien’s writing and will thus devote my attention to his work, though it extends past the writing of Tolkien and becomes less forgivable as it does so.  Before I explore the racism of fantasy world-building in the Tolkien tradition of epic fantasy, let me first make clear that I do not believe Tolkien was personally a racist.  He certainly wasn’t a racist in the sense appropriate to his times given that he praised the Jewish people and had great sympathy for the mistreatment of Africans in their native continent by colonialists as well as equal disdain for racism towards Germans and the racist ideology of German Nazis and their anti-Semitic sympathizers.

          That is not to say that by today’s standards Tolkien could be viewed as a benevolent racist with condescending and exoticized impressions of people of color.  But that is not the point.  I am not interesting in criticizing Tolkien himself as a racist, malevolent or benevolent, but in critiquing the racism inherent in his fantastic fiction.  Even if Tolkien himself opposed racism consciously in his person, he embodied it unconsciously in his writing, which has been continuously reproduced in those inspired by his Middle Earth mythology.  His literature transformed the fantasy genre and its continued relevance and popularity makes a critical analysis of it necessary.  The implicit racism of fantasy is not merely detrimental to people of color, but it is detrimental to the imaginative and progressive potential of the genre itself.

          In the mythology of Middle Earth, racism, like morality, is a matter of literal black and white and with racism and morality being mutually reinforcing to the fiction.  The good races of humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits and wizards are near universally represented as fair Europeans while the evil races in service to Sauron are men of the South and East, Southron and Easterlings, paralleling Arabs, Africans and Indians, or sub-human creatures of troll, goblin and orc of dark complexion and slant-eyed.  In and of itself, the tendency for fantasy to create unique ethnicities and races (i.e. species) distinct from humanity is not any more problematic than the tendency of science-fiction authors to imagine species of alien distinct from humanity.  The problem is when the fantasy author homogenizes race around morality absolutely, such that to be an elf is to be inherently predisposed to do good and to be an orc is to be inherently evil.  This is especially problematic when the ethnicity or race parallels a historical ethnicity, especially one that has suffered or continues to suffer radical discrimination and oppression.

          It was a flaw of Tolkien’s work that the majority of the evil forces came from the regions of East and South, from cultures strongly resembling African, Middle Eastern and Indian people, and that the entirety of these cultures was represented as evil.  Even more flawed is his description of orcs, in particular the sub-species of uruk-hai, as slant-eyed, repulsive Mongol-types.  The historical cultures of Africa and Asia have had to struggle with colonialism and imperialism justified through demonized or romanticized orientalist ideologies and that legacy is reflected in the literary politics of much fantasy literature.  The dark skinned people of the East and South are represented as exotic, ignorant, enigmatic, immoral or even inhuman in ways that that parallel historical racist ideologies.  Creating a fictional parallel to Asian or African cultures is not merely acceptable but beneficial for both the people and the genre but only insofar as such fictional representations are sufficiently culturally diverse and not morally homogenous so as to subvert offensive stereotypes.


          Although Tolkien’s literature has examples of good people or races turning to evil, the fall of the Numenoreans for example, there is the utter absence of evil races finding redemption.  The only way to deal with evil peoples is to kill them, and this usually involves killing the entire population of them.  This inequality is typically repeated in epic fantasy with the trope of good characters being corrupted by the evil lord and evil characters, if not whole races, needing to be slain because they are incapable of being accepting what is good.  Evil is thus not only pervasive but pathological and the solution to it is perverse; because the evil can corrupt the good and the good cannot convince the evil to abandon their immorality, the good can only maintain moral purity by eliminating all those deemed evil.  It is a moral duty to seek the extermination of orcs and goblins, trolls and ogres, because they in turn seek the extermination of the more fair and noble races.  However, their motivation for such wanton bloodlust remains inexplicable and enigmatic amounting to nothing more than the identification of their race with evil incarnate.

          One may object that we are here speaking of orcs and ogres, not mere men, and that for the former morality is essential while for the latter it is incidental.  That is to say that an orc cannot be good and still be considered an orc but a man can be good or evil and still be considered a man (one may even go so far as to say that for a man to necessarily be good or evil is not to be a man at all.  This response is uninteresting because the idea of a person, human or orc, as inherently evil is incoherent; evil is an intentional act with motive and meaning but if the being is innately evil then its actions are not motivated by evil intentions but merely by instincts that ape what we consider evil.  This lack of intentionality makes it impossible to identify with the motives of such people and it is precisely the power of evil to parody that which is good and to rationalize itself as an instrument of that good, that makes it such a threat to morality and such a tragic source of conflict in literature and history alike.  Without the contingency of evil being dependent upon corrupt motives, one cannot empathize with one’s enemies and one cannot struggle to comprehend the lessons of moral conflict and the narrative collapses into self-serving and impoverished ideology.

          Epic fantasy has a tendency to be inconsistent in its racism, and all the more racist for it.  On the one hand, fantastic races such as orcs and trolls are considered inhuman.  But on the other hand, such races are able to reproduce with humans (or other fantastic races) to produce half-breeds who are viewed as a corruptive degeneration of the more noble and pure half of their ancestry.  For example, in Tolkien the uruk-hai are born of the union between man and orc, with orcs themselves being a union of corrupt elves.  Even though elves, men and orcs are considered different races, they are able to produce offspring with one another. This inconsistency between labeling another being in-human (and in the case of races like orcs, sub-human), yet having fear and disgust over it producing children with a human is a parallel to historical racism.  There has been a tendency to vilify people of color as sub-human animals while also being anxious and hateful of unions between them and white people.  This irrational category of in-human human parallels the irrational fear and hatred of the racist themselves.  The race is a threat both because it is inhuman and incapable the moral and racial purity of humanity but also because it can infiltrate this humanity.  This returns us to the justification and celebration of genocidal warfare popularized in epic fantasies against inhuman species: because the inhuman is inherently immoral and cannot be integrated into society, but can infiltrate society and spread its corruptive influence through breeding, it must be exterminated through righteous violence.

          A modest effort to provide some diversity in the fantasy genre has been to create cultural parallels between minority races in history and literature.  However, such parallels have a tendency to be inadequate or inconsiderate.  One on hand, cultural diversity might manifest superficially as simply a mere difference in skin tone while still retaining the same Eurocentric culture; on the other hand, such multicultural representation may be fetishized into exotic and oriental stereotypes.  The Southron and Easterlings in Tolkien are of the latter sort as are the Dothraki of Martin to a less offensive extent.  An extreme example of this tendency would be the association of the appropriated historical culture with a fantastical in-human or sub-human race.  Elves may be given a semblance of Native American civilization or goblins may have a Mongol aesthetic.

          People of color who have already had their cultural identity and historical narratives marginalized and manipulated by those in power; they are appropriated into commodified parodies or incorporated into the ideological narratives of their oppressors, if not erased entirely.  In this effort to historicize fantastic literature we equally fantasize the history of already alienated peoples; in an attempt to humanize our monsters we demonize a people even further.  People of color who have already had their cultural identity and historical narratives marginalized and manipulated by those in power; they are appropriated into commodified parodies or incorporated into the ideological narratives of their oppressors, if not erased entirely.  When this imposition is superficial, the effect is quite obviously de-humanizing and doubly so. Such superficial imposition of cultural diversity is doubly offensive for not only does it reduce the historical culture to token tropes of ritual or aesthetic but it also refashions it into the culture of some in-human race. Yet the dominant white cultures of the genre continue to parallel the dominant white cultures of history, free from association with the inhuman and monstrous despite the often inhumanely monstrous consequences of their racist imperialism.

          Some further object to racist accusations of the fantasy genre by insisting that this is the way the world was back then.  Back when? When dragons flew the skies, dwarves mined the depths, and wizards amused the masses with magic? This is yet another irrational inconsistency in the racist strand of fantasy fiction.  It both parodies reality as a justification for its offensive stereotypes but escapes reality to act out the appalling logic of those fantasies: Middle Earth is British mythic fantasy and at the time the Ottoman East was an existential threat to the West, but its fine to label the Easterlings indiscriminately evil because they are not really Ottoman Turks, and after all, and it’s just fantasy anyways, so the enjoying the literary slaughter of them is morally inconsequential.  Such orientalist readings operate by oscillating between reality and fantasy where convenient when criticized but the incoherence is evident.

          One need not make a historical critique of this response by showing that the conflict between East and West was not a class of civilizations and still less a cataclysm of monumental good and evil or that history is not monumental and fixated on feudal medieval Europe but encompasses other empires and epochs too.   One need only point out the obvious reality that fantasy literature is not about historical realities but fictional fantasies.  When one writes a fantasy narrative, the world building is not, and should attempt not be, in explicit dialogue with the historical realities of the author (even though there may be allegorical parallels) but instead it should be in conversation with the history of other fantasy writings.  Tolkien’s Middle-Earth has little relation to the history of medieval England than it does the fantasies and romances popular in Medieval England and when Martin or Meiville write their contemporary grim or weird fantasy epics, they are converting and subverting the literary tropes and genre expectations popularized by Tolkien far more than they are doing so with modern history itself.

          Given this one may still be indifferent towards such fictional discrimination and insist that it is merely just fantasy so it is not truly racist; they aren’t Arab, they are Haradrim, and they aren’t African Americans, they are ogres.  Even if the parallel is superficially related to appearance and geography only, the parallel can nevertheless be offensive.  If Haradrim are universally portrayed as dark-skinned primitive tribesmen from the East who worship an evil false god in Sauron, that is enough of a parallel to cause warranted offense to people of Middle Eastern or Indian descent.  Then consider how monstrous races like orcs are also associated with supposedly primitive and oppressive cultures.  Multiply that trope again and again in authors who follow the moralistic cosmology that Tolkien originated and you have a history of people of color being discriminated against in fantasy literature.  This would not be a problem if it were not a pervasive tendency in much of fantasy literature; one could perhaps enjoy a book featuring pale protagonists fighting against dark-skinned demons from the South if this was a limited example of a diverse and imaginative genre but unfortunately it is a recurrent narrative of fantasy.  

          This is a particularly painful irony given that the escapism fantasy is criticized for has been rendered futile for the oppressed; seeking to escape the abuse of their identity in reality through the solace of literature, they see the same racist stereotypes represented in the genre with the most potential to directly confront and subvert the racist fantasies of that haunt our history.  A black boy humiliated by his white class-mates may seek to escape from his oppressive situation by contemplating on the struggles of a young boy in a fantasy world, only to find that the only black characters in the story are evil foreigners, if there are any black characters at all.  It is symptomatic of white privilege to be able to escape into fantastic literature and easily find empowering examples of people who parallel one’s own culture and it is representative of racism to find the same negative associations between dark skin, foreign customs and moral evil as one finds in the ideologies of racist politics.

          The association of racism with fantasy isn’t just offensive to the minorities it implicitly insults but undermines the fantasy genre itself.  Fantasy is already considered a sub-literary genre merely because of its intrinsic imaginative potential, and is accused of indulgent escapism.  I think the very name of the genre itself, fantasy, is revealing when one contemplates its relationship with implicit racism.  Fantasy literature is just that, a fantasy that we indulge in, and these indulgences are revealing of our mindsets.  Someone who takes oblivious pleasure from a narrative dominated by xenophobic aristocratic pseudo-Europeans struggling against evil dark-skinned and sub-human hordes in order to restore the feudal status-quo, is complicit in allowing literature to perpetuate the oppressive ideologies of history, if not unconsciously supportive of such oppression.  This is the failure of Tolkien and his ilk: even if they speak out against racism, their literature enables it because it parallels the orientalizing and dehumanizing aesthetic fantasies that oppression depends upon.  Fantasy that reproduces such systems of oppression in its world-building is at best uninteresting and at worst irresponsible.

          Fantasy can be relevant to reality, not because of its fidelity to history but in spite of it; fantasy is most progressive and transformative when it confronts the crisis of history without being confined by the identities and ideologies that cause them.  When one reads a fantasy epic about the struggle between elves and orcs, one can bypass their inherent prejudices to better contemplate moral and existential ambiguities that would be less transparent if the narrative was based around a perspective they were predisposed towards. But when one starts to notice that all the elves are white and noble and from the civilized West while the orcs are universally dark and primitive from the exotic and evil East, such potential is lost.  The appeal of the fantasy genre is the simplicity and beauty of its cosmological economy; the world can be built around moralized aesthetics to create a hyper-symbolic universe (where dark literally represents evil and light good for example); but this is also its great danger insofar as certain people fall outside of this mythic order (i.e. dark skinned people reading it find those similar to them identified as evil by skin-tone alone).   Fantasy provides an escape from the constriction of our own cultural narratives and expectations so that we may return to reality with a better appreciation for those of others as well as our own.  Fantasy has the greatest potential to confront and contradict oppression against racist oppression so it is all the more offensive when it is just another means to perpetually interpret them as Other.

          What is to be done to empower not only marginalized people of color, but the marginalized genre of fantasy itself? One should be aware that not all fantasy writers are guilty of such abuse, and I have my hopes that writers are becoming increasingly aware of the moral inadequacy of the genre’s world-building and are being proactive in correcting it, with some sub-genres being more vocal than others.  Urban fantasy, steam-punk and new weird writers such as China Meiville, Max Gladstone, NK Jemisin, Ian McDonald, Neil Gaiman, David Anthony Durham, Daniel Abraham, and Ursala K Le Guin write for, if not from, marginalized identities and their empowerment within and through literary fantasy.  Fantasy is a predominantly white genre, and whether this is the cause or the effect of its tendency towards aestheticizing racism I am not certain, but I am certain that because of its inherent white privilege it is the responsibility of white authors to be more active in addressing this perversion of their genre’s potential.  White authors are published easier and more successfully than minority authors and are better received by fans and thus they have more potential to transform the genre for a wider audience.  But this means dealing honestly with racism in their literature.  Just as ignoring racial identities perpetuates the oppression of people of color and only reinforces white privilege, so too does stripping fantasy of racial conflict ignore the reality of it within history as well as the genre.  A fantasy narrative devoid of racial tension and misunderstanding equally lacks dramatic interest and moral relevance.

          Racism should be both more explicit in fantasy worlds but equally more openly confronted and contradicted.  If elves are to hate orcs universally, then their prejudice should be more obviously an ad hoc rationalization and it should be undermined over the course of the narrative by exposure to orcs that defy the stereotype of their racist rationalizations (i.e. if elves hate orcs because they are cruel, should an example of an orc sheltering a lower class elf from the abuses of an elf aristocrat).  If orcs are fated to be evil, give them enough moral complexity to make a reader empathetic to their motives even as they expressly oppose them; the orcs have been confined to a ghetto of their former civilization by the xenophobic elves and now slaughter elves indifferently at any opportunity because they feel that all of elf-kind is complicit in the collapse of their orc civilization.

          Historical parallels to reality should be sensitive to minority cultures, and if representative of said cultures , they should not follow insulting stereotypical and intersectional binaries; the race with a Native American aesthetic should not be red-skinned sub-human tribesmen and the Arab analogy should not be confined to bearded and veiled theocratic terrorists.  Expand and exchange customs and costumes to create something identifiable but individual; have orcs be pale-skinned and sophisticated, with an East-Asian steam-punk aesthetic and have them situated from the North while the elves are a dark-skinned, sea-faring empire from the East with cultural similarities to Aztecs or Mayans.  This makes the world both familiar and free; there are identifying similarities to history but they are divorced from prejudicial associations between physical appearance, moral decency, cultural sophistication and technological innovation that would otherwise confine your narrative.  With these sorts of suggestions in mind, I think we can better appreciate the progressive elements of fantasy literature and use it to perpetuate positive and creative representations of marginalized people of color that have otherwise been largely absent from the history of the genre.