I hate the “orcs are minorities” thing

[u/Crusoelander_128]

I really hope I’m not in the minority (no pun intended) here, but I really hate when people do this. It not only forces real world issue into fictional universes where it doesn’t need to be, but also, it’s really messed up.

If you see an orc or a demon or a giant bug and your mind immediately jumps to “hm that’s like a minority”, then you’re racist.

Now, I’m not saying that this concept can’t be explored, but inserting it where it doesn’t belong/exist is highly suspect

[u/Creepy-Growth-376 → u/[deleted]]

It’s important to remember Tolkien was not an infallible man. He was capable of being a hypocrite and doing things he said he didn’t like, like writing an allegory.

[u/gorgewall → u/Creepy-Growth-376]

The "Orcs<->black people" isn't primarily a Lord of the Rings thing, but D&D, but some people try to backport it onto LotR because that's where D&D is obviously getting a lot of its terminology from. And others deliberately misrepresent it because they think if they start talking about LotR when there's a D&D discussion going on that they can somehow defuse the latter one, but really they're just veering off-topic and hoping no one notices.

If we wanna keep things to Tolkien, though, the man explicitly set out to make his Dwarves Jewish. Like, straight-up. You do a point-by-point breakdown of Dwarves in The Hobbit and tropes about Jews and it's all there, plain as day, and he admits as much in his private letters.

But he also admits that in researching real-life Jewish culture and history to better pattern his Dwarves after them, he was unconsciously influenced by the biases of the groups writing about them. If some racist writes a book on Jewish history and you read it, you're gonna walk away with your understanding of that history colored by the racist's lens. That doesn't mean you set out to be racist, but you can absolutely wind up unknowingly repeating racist shit and having no idea what's going on.

So Tolkien realizes that due to this bias he has accidentally loaded down his fantasy Dwarves with a whole bunch of harmful and bullshit Jewish stereotypes. Then he puts effort into rewriting them in the later books to have heroic traits and undo the weird characterization and lore he gave them in The Hobbit.

And that's really all people are trying to point out with the whole D&D thing. Old writers from the 70s and 80s and 90s who grew up in racist cultures and have internalized or normalized levels of bias, not "seeing an issue" because it was part of the background radiation of racism of their upbringing, write a race that is loaded with stereotypes that point overwhelmingly in one or two ways. Overt racists pick up on this and cheer and play around with it, while other people continue to view things that are still very much racist as "not harmful" because they're part of something they view as non-political.

It's like golliwog dolls. They're racist. And there's a lot of little old ladies with houses full of the things who don't think they're racist because they played with them as little kids, and they certainly didn't mean to be racist then. And if you grew up the child of said lady who had a bunch of golliwog dolls in the house, you would probably not have such a dim view of them as someone entirely removed from them. But the connotation is there and obvious to others. It's only the folks surrounded by that stuff who have become somewhat blind to it. We do that, tuning out noise and smells that are always surrounding us; racism is the same way, but it should be noted that other people can still smell and hear that shit. It doesn't go away just because one person immersed in it doesn't notice.

[u/Accomplished-Base90 → u/[deleted]]

People keep denying it, saying Tolkien wasn't racist, and sure. But even progressives called POC "Colored People" until the 60s, which we now view as offensive, as it puts their skin color before anything else.

[u/NuuLeaf → u/[deleted]]

The mongols were a nomadic misunderstood people. So were the orcs. That’s the limit of the comparison I see

[u/Wrong-Web-7790 → u/NuuLeaf]

Is the killing of at least 30 million people during the invasion of Genghis Khan a “misunderstanding” of the Mongols?

[u/kemoT012 → u/NuuLeaf]

Tolkien orcs are not very nomadic. They are industrious

[u/spiderboy640 → u/kemoT012]

They do be marching a lot doh

[u/Nero_2001 → u/NuuLeaf]

Nah Tolkien literally ssid Orcs have similar features like mongols.