Black and White

Rachel Port

Well-Known Member
I think the reason race is brought up in relation to The Lord of the Rings is not because the bad guys have black skin, but is more structural. The point is that black is almost always used to describe something evil (the only exception I can think of is the black and silver livery of Minas Tirith and Aragorn's flag, that black and silver represent Gondor), and when people are clothed in white we know they are good. That is, value is associated with blackness and whiteness. We tend to take this kind of language for granted, but that's what makes it structural - it's part of the assumptions white people make - can make precisely because we are white. It's like old westerns - the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black. It's how we can tell who's who.
 
In Moby Dick, there is a chapter called 'The Whiteness of the Whale' in which Herman Melville discusses contexts in which the color white is ominous or evil or disturbing. The white of bleached bones, for instance. The one place in Lord of the Rings when this discussion comes to mind for me is always Theoden's cane. Attention is drawn to the white head of that cane, and it is a very ominous object.
 
Interesting. Theoden's cane does have a bleached bones quality, like the spells of Wormtongue. White can certainly be associated with death - shrouds and ghosts and such. It's many years since I last read Moby Dick, when I was a young woman. At that time I was about to spend the summer on an island, and I had a dream that I was on the Pequod and it was getting near the end of the book and I couldn't get off.

I've been working to be more aware of structural racism in myself and around me. The most recent time I read LOTR I was very uncomfortably aware of the black/white dichotomy.
 
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Hi Rachel,

Is it possible that you are looking at black and white too exclusively through a current cultural lens?

Does the black and white of the yin/yang symbol in the Far East have anything to do with ethnicity?

How do cultures in China, or Japan, or Thailand, or Africa, the Middle East, or Native America interpret the colors black and white?

Is the symbolism of day (good) and night (scary and bad) deep rooted in all human cultures, affecting the interpretation of the colors black and white much more than ethnicities?
 
When people critique Tolkien's treatment of race, I think it has much more to do with his use of 'swart', 'squint-eyed', and the now rather infamous lines about 'black men like half-trolls' and 'least lovely Mongol-types' from the text and a letter, respectively. Of course this is an endlessly nuanced conversation, which has been covered well in works like Fimi's Tolkien, race and cultural history. (Which is to say, I'm not here making any arguments, just observing what others have argued.)
 
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Flammifer whatever the origin of the iconography and its usage it cannot be divorced from the current cultural climate and it is right to be concerned that the use of black representing bad and white representing good is problematic in a society that is trying to say that one color is no better or worse than another. That he was using standard iconography makes it no less of an issue.
 
Thank you Longtimer. Beech27, yes, that's there strongly as well.

Flammifer, I can only say that the superiority of one race over others was the basis of the empire, and that's not just a current cultural lens.
 
Which Empire, and which 'race', Rachel? 'Race' is a dubious term of little scientific basis. There have been many Empires. Perhaps the Mongol Empire was based on the superiority of the Mongols over all others, and various Chinese Empires based on the superiority of the Han Chinese over all others (the current one certainly seems to have that bias). The Japanese Empire did seem to be based on the superiority of the Japanese 'race' over all others. I don't think that the Roman Empire seems to have been particularly based on the idea of the supremacy of the Roman 'race'. The Nazi Empire, of course, is the prime example of an Empire explicitly based on that idea (although their idea of an 'Aryan Race' has absolutely no scientific justification).
 
Flammifer your comment about looking at Tolkien's middle-earth and his writing through the current cultural lens gets to the heart of the most difficult issues in the current racial/social equality movement. Do we judge the past by current standards, their standards, or do we understand that people in the past did not consider themselves racist/sexist/any other ist and by the standards of their time were not yet by our standards or by some absolute standards they were.
Almost all empires have been based on the theory that those establishing the empire were superior. Egyptian, Spanish and Portuguese, British, US concept of Manifest Destiny,
Sorry this is way outside of Exploring LOTR
 
Hi Longtimer,

Good post, and spot on. I think that if we are good historians we do not judge the past through our current cultural lenses (or at least try not to), but try to understand the cultural lenses of the past through which those people interpreted their world.

I agree that most empires have thought that those establishing the empire were superior to those they were adding to the empire, but, this has not always (often?) been based on conceptions of 'race'.

Also, some empire builders only thought they were superior in some aspects to those they conquered. A good example would be the Romans, who greatly admired the Greeks, and thought the Greeks were their superiors in many ways, (though not militarily nor in governance).

I would say that many imperialists did not base their sense of superiority on 'race'. The Romans are a good example. They did not consider themselves a separate 'race' from those they conquered in Italy. They had emperors from every part of the empire and many different ethnic origins. The Greeks considered themselves superior to other peoples, so Alexander's empire may have had some 'racial' biases (though perhaps not many), but the empires of Athens and Sparta did not, seeing as how the imperial subjects were other Greek polities. I don't think the Ottoman Empire was particularly preoccupied with 'race' for most of its existence. The Holy Roman Empire (mostly composed of Germanic and Italian peoples for most of its existence) does not seem to have had 'racial' issues.

You mention the Spanish Empire, as having notions of 'racial' superiority. I think it did in its later days, however, originally, differences of religion mattered much more to the Spanish than differences of 'race'.

Empires are complicated, and what the imperialists thought of their imperial subjects varied greatly across time and space, and from empire to empire.
 
Flammifer whatever the origin of the iconography and its usage it cannot be divorced from the current cultural climate and it is right to be concerned that the use of black representing bad and white representing good is problematic in a society that is trying to say that one color is no better or worse than another. That he was using standard iconography makes it no less of an issue.

I disagree, and believe that judging traditional iconography by current culture climate is taking it out of context. My understanding is that the moral use of black and white comes from things tending to get darker when dirty or stained, and lighter when cleaned. Taken to the extremes, then, white becomes a symbol of purity, and black one of corruption. While some have used black and white both racially and morally at once, there is no compelling reason to assume that one use automatically assumes the other.

If it is impossible for some to read "black" and "white" without taking both meanings, then I suggest it is the racial wording that makes more sense to change, as people are actually all just shades of brown (save albinos).
 
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