 A lot of my best memories from childhood involve sitting with my brother listening to my mom or my dad read books to us. The first book I really remember my dad reading was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Token. I must have been 5 or 6 years old when I was first introduced to the world of Middle Earth. A few years later we'd gotten through The Lord of the Rings and my folks gave me a set of cassette tapes in a wooden case, which I still have, featuring radio play versions of both stories produced by a drama company called The Mind's Eye. I listened to them on a loop, the same way a lot of kids watch Frozen over and over. When I'd get to the end of The Hobbit, I'd listen to The Lord of the Rings, and when I got to the end of that, I'd start the whole thing again. I literally wore those tapes out. As I got a little older, I got to see the Rankin and Bass animated version of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi's adaptation of The Fellowship and The Two Towers, somewhere along the way, I even got to see a live stage show of The Hobbit featuring life-sized puppetry. I've even tried, though admittedly failed, to read The Silmarillion. These stories have been deeply ingrained in the way that I think about fantasy literature for pretty much my whole life. So when Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy came out in 2001, it was a big deal for me. I still watch them all, at least once a year. I've been thinking a lot about these stories recently and about some of the criticism that's emerged over the last few years, as members of the Church of the Perpetually Agreed dig through classic works of fiction to find new things to get offended by. A small cottage industry of YouTubers, writers, critics, and academics has popped up who now see The Lord of the Rings, a story written in 1954 by deeply religious Englishmen, as just another example of systemic racism, sexism, and other types of inexcusable bigotry. Even the Token Society's 2021 conference is filled with sessions built around these kinds of claims. At the same time, several states are talking about banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools, and there's a whole battle raging in the culture over what I can only really describe at this point as wokeism. And while I'm not actually in favor of state bans on what can or can't be taught, as that tends to be the death of nuance and could easily have a chilling effect on worthwhile classroom conversation, I certainly don't think these ideas need to be getting state funding and we need to challenge them every opportunity. And to do that, we need to be as clear as we can about what these ideas are all about, even when advocates make it nearly impossible to do. So as crazy as this might seem, I want to talk about all that and more on today's episode. Fair warning, no matter what side of these issues you come down on, I'm probably going to say some things in this video that could shock and possibly offend you. You might not agree with everything I'm about to say, but I'm going to do my best to bring some nuance and insight to a very difficult and sensitive conversation. So I hope you'll stick around and watch all the way to the end, leave a comment and enjoy this critical episode of Out of Frame. Right out of the gate, I want to address the Oliphant in the room. Is Lord of the Rings racist? I'll give my answer to that question in a second, but before you freak out, I promise you this isn't another video about how people today are being oppressed by a 67-year-old book, nor is it going to be about how orcs are probably just good guys who are stereotyped as evil because they look scared. In fact, what it's really going to be about is how we now live in a world where the same people who try to cancel books and movies like The Lord of the Rings and put warning labels on outdated representations of different groups of people actually build their entire worldview around collectivist stereotypes. But yeah, I think we can be honest about this. The Lord of the Rings is a little racist. Consider, each race in Middle Earth has certain attributes that were led to believe to find the individual members of the group. Hobbits are quiet, soft, and simple. Elves are noble and pure. Dwarves are greedy and mistrustful. Humans seek power above all else. Easterlings are swarthy nomads and orcs are corrupted creations of evil. The way that these groups are presented is often fairly simplistic, especially for the bad guys. And unsurprisingly, the description of each group generally aligns to the way most British people saw the world in the early 20th century. In one of his letters to magazine editor Forrest J. Ackerman, Tolkien wrote that the orcs were squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow skin with wide mouths and slant eyes. In fact, degraded and repulsive versions of the two Europeans, least lovely Mongol types. And the Urokai, the scariest of all the orcs, were described in the two towers as black orcs of great strength. Of course, some of this is just a consequence of the long-standing use of lightness and darkness as metaphors for good and evil. This kind of symbolism has obviously been pervasive throughout the history of literature, from Shakespeare to the Bible. And in a lot of ways, it's easy to understand why most cultures around the world use it. Darkness is mystery and danger and fear. Light is warmth and sunshine, hope. But when you turn that into visual representations of people, the light and dark symbolism starts to get really awkward. Especially in the context of a time and culture where racism is the norm and people with darker skin were seen as second-class citizens. But that's not all. The dwarves are described as short and large-nosed. The dwarven language is explicitly borrowed from Hebrew, and even the arc and stone of Thrain was probably meant to be a reference to the Ark of the Covenant. Have you learned nothing of the stubbornness of dwarves? And looking back on Tolkien's words from a modern context, some of what he said about his characters is, well, it certainly doesn't seem great. In one of his letters, he wrote, I do think of the dwarves like Jews, at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. Now, before you get mad at me for mentioning this, hear me out. Tolkien's views weren't as simple as a lot of his modern critics would make them seem, because while he did see people as members of collective racial groups, he was hardly anti-Semitic. In a 1941 letter to his son, he shared his thoughts on World War II, writing, I have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler. He went on to say that Hitler was ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed that noble Northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved and tried to present in its true light. I bid you stand, then, on the west! So it's not like he was some closeted Nazi trying to push a hateful ideology on his readers. Quite the opposite, actually. Multiple sources confirm that Tolkien was often highly complimentary of Jewish people and stood up to German publishers when they started asking prying questions about his ancestry. In one unsent reply, he wrote, I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. But all that said, I think we can and should be able to acknowledge that JRR Tolkien did think of individual people as first and foremost identified by their race and ethnicity. Like most people of his time, Tolkien had a collectivist and nationalistic worldview. And it's one that fits most of the traditional definitions of racism, such as discrimination or prejudice based on race, or the belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes. And in a lot of ways, it even fits the most negative part of the definition. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability, and that a particular race is superior to others. In The Lord of the Rings, he makes it pretty clear that the superior group is the elves. And there's a fairly strong case for seeing them as an allegory for European Christians who get to enter the kingdom of heaven and live for eternity when all the other groups of people have to remain behind. The thing is, this was an extremely common way of thinking among his contemporaries, including many of the progressive science fiction and fantasy writers in the early 1900s. For example, you might remember that I brought this up in the episode I did on Brave New World. Aldous Huxley's cast system was explicitly written to have the light-skinned alphas at the top of the economic, social, and intellectual hierarchy and the darkest-skinned epsilons at the bottom, bred to do menial labor without thinking. He literally described them as mostly black, ugly, and monkey-like creatures that are often handicapped. You'd have to work pretty hard not to see the racism there. But does that mean we should be campaigning to cancel books like Brave New World or The Lord of the Rings? And while we're at it, should we toss aside stories like Othello or The Tempest? Should we ban Mark Twain and Edgar Rice Burroughs? Does the fact that books sometimes perpetuate stereotypes that could be found virtually anywhere at the time they were written mean they're complicit in modern-day oppression? No, I don't think so. While I do think it's important to recognize that all sorts of ugly collectivist ideas used to be more pervasive in our society, there's far more to those stories and their authors than can be crammed into a few angry hot takes on Twitter. And I think that it's absolutely possible to have a nuanced conversation about this stuff without getting offended and without dismissing opportunities to learn from great historical works of art, even if we don't agree with everything about them or their creators. Unfortunately, that's not how a lot of people steeped in critical race theory, intersectionalism, wokeism, or whatever you wanna call it, tend to think, which is why a lot of them seem to want to destroy token and his legacy. This is a subject that's been all over the news lately, in part because of some states like Florida that have decided to ban teaching critical race theory in schools. But what is it? Honestly, I've spent several days trying to find a way to explain this as accurately as I can, but one thing I've realized is that CRT means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Neither critics nor advocates seem to be particularly consistent or clear. Originally, critical race theory was an idea that emerged out of the Harvard, UCLA, and Columbia law schools in the late 80s and early 90s. It took the concept of critical theory and applied it to the history of the US legal system. We've talked about this a little bit before, but essentially critical theory is a method of understanding the world built around the Marxist notion of class struggle. According to the Frankfurt School Marxists that developed the idea, literally everything, history, sociology, psychology, law, science, you name it, should be examined through the lens of the oppressor crushing the oppressed. Critical race theory applies the same class struggle narrative towards analyzing law and political power, focusing on the way racism was legally embedded into our society. Through this lens, proponents claim we can more clearly see and deal with issues like Jim Crow, redlining and other policies that were explicitly designed to hurt minority groups. I think that's actually a laudable goal and if that's where it really focused its attention, critical race theory might provide some valuable insights. For years at fee, we've talked about the way that the law has been explicitly used to harm unpopular or powerless people. Occupational licensing, zoning and even minimum wage laws were all designed to keep undesirables out of certain professions and communities. I've personally made multiple documentaries and short films about similar subjects. This has always been one of the greatest dangers of concentrated power and I think we should be talking about it. But these observations aren't unique to critical race theory. So if all CRT was about was just uncovering the truth about historical injustice, it wouldn't really tell us any more than what classical liberals have been saying for 250 years. So that description seems a bit dishonest. Another thing advocates often claim is that critical theory is a purely academic discipline but it's all tied into the Marxist concept of praxis which is the process of realizing an idea in practical application. The core premise essentially requires activism which is often going to be inherently at odds with good scholarship. Being an activist and being a historian, a social scientist, a lawyer, not the same thing. If you believe that your role as an academic is to reshape society instead of uncovering objective truths about the world, your intellectual priorities are already in conflict. And given the warped emphasis on political activism, their papers are often shockingly absurd and their arguments are so comical in some cases that even people who edit their top tier journals can be easily duped by outlandish fakes with such titles as human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. And because most of these people are starting with their ideological beliefs and working backwards, you'll almost always find that no matter what the evidence actually suggests, their conclusions are always the same. Concepts like systemic racism which could have some merit if their definitions were limited and clear wind up meaning almost anything at any time, encompassing everything from laws that explicitly restricted black people from owning businesses in the 1900s to the visual depiction of orcs in the Lord of the Rings. So while I agree with the idea of seriously studying history and being honest about the way that racism and sexism or any other form of collectivism shaped our culture and our laws and how those ideas continue to affect people today, critical race theory seems a lot more like a jargon filled justification for political activism to me. I found that no matter who I read or quote from the originators of the concept such as Kimberly Crenshaw to the modern advocates pushing it in schools, media and corporate training sessions such as Robin D'Angelo, nobody knows the real version. In the end, it's really hard to pin some of these definitions down. And to be honest, I think that a lot of the people who are most committed to these ideas actually prefer it that way. It allows them to push the boundary of ridiculous, sometimes offensive claims while still maintaining some level of deniability when they get called out. Ultimately, what we seem to have here is what's known as a Mott and Bailey argumentation fallacy baked into the core of CRT and woke-ism in general. The basic idea is that you stake out an extreme position. For example, you claim that all people of color are oppressed or the United States was founded specifically to uphold slavery. Or perhaps even that the entirety of Western society from the Enlightenment onward, including individualism, natural rights, market economies, limited government due process and liberalism is irredeemably racist and designed to maintain white supremacy. None of these claims are particularly defensible with evidence or logic, but they are sensational, capture a whole lot of attention and seem to be convincing to a lot of people looking to confirm their biases. That's the Bailey. But then when you get challenged on those extreme positions, you can always fall back to some less objectionable claims that no one really disagrees with. In this case, that might be the statement, many laws have racist origins that still play a role in social outcomes today, which is perfectly true, even if it's not exactly groundbreaking. That's the Mott. This tactic is pretty clever as it allows CRT advocates to say some truly insane things. And when people reject them, they can always claim that their critics are trying to silence important, unassailable discussions of public policy and history. Consider some of the positions activists have taken just in the last few years. We've seen huge, well-publicized examples of CRT advocacy such as the New York Times 1619 project, which was riddled with factual and historical errors. But when credible historians and legal scholars challenged its claims, the New York Times quietly published retractions while the project's lead author, Nicole Hannah-Jones called her critics racists on Twitter. We've seen Coca-Cola tell their entire staff that it should be less white, as if their employees' race predetermined their values and beliefs. When called out for being absurdly offensive and discriminatory, Coca-Cola claimed that their goal was simply workplace inclusion, nailed it. We've seen example after example of people inspired by critical race theory claiming that different groups, often clumsily broken into white people and people of color, have traits that are inherent to their race. Apparently we're all so different that it's literally impossible for the members of each racial group to ever truly understand or effectively communicate with members of another group. The National Museum of African American History and Culture created and distributed a set of graphics that pushed the idea that the nuclear family, planning for the future, punctuality, science, reason, and an emphasis on competence are white traits that don't apply to black people. I mean, wow, wow. In the end, I think there's no reasonable way to interpret what we're seeing other than to just acknowledge that a lot of these ideas are little more than another form of incoherent bigotry. Of course, nobody who's pushing CRT wants to confront the fact that they're engaging in racism by assigning inherent traits to groups of people based on their race. So their solution is to redefine that word too. Traditionally, racism has always been understood as a type of belief that anybody could express. And as sad as this is, if you look around the world and ask questions on surveys that help us compare relative levels of racial bigotry, it's very easy to see that this is and has always been a universal phenomenon. There have been race-based wars and genocides going back thousands of years. And you can find these kinds of attitudes in every country and culture. But recently, when asked for a simple definition of racism, Ibram X. Kendi, one of the most prominent modern advocates of CRT, gave this answer. So racism, I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas. That really clears it up, doesn't it? Look, I really don't wanna be uncharitable here, but Kendi has written popular books. He's been speaking about these issues for years. He's seriously influential. He should at least have a coherent answer to such a fundamental question. For example, for a lot of other people who share his ideology, the new definition of racism is now bigotry combined with power and privilege. But once again, they have predictably defined power and privilege not as contextual to people's individual political, economic, and social situations, but rather as immutable traits that are associated with their racial groups. That way, the only people with privilege, in the US at least, are white people, all white people. Conveniently, this means that anyone who is part of a collective group that's been assigned the label of the oppressed can say whatever they want, no matter how bigoted, and it can't possibly be defined as racist because their group isn't seen as having power. The same shift happened several years ago with the concept of colorblindness. That term used to be about avoiding stereotypes and treating people as individuals. But today, critics claim that anyone who says their colorblind is lying and using the idea as a shield to ignore historical injustice. This is nonsense. Treating people as individuals and rejecting the idea that skin color or ethnicity determine a person's experiences and ideas does not require anyone to ignore injustice. It certainly doesn't require anyone to cover up damaging parts of history. And that brings us all the way back to the Lord of the Rings. When I was a kid, influenced by these stories and listening to them again and again, the prevailing belief of my parents and most of the people around me was that the ideal way to think about other people was not simply as representatives of their race, ethnicity, or gender. The goal was to be colorblind. But that was never a literal concept. It can't be. It's a metaphor for individualism and for upholding Martin Luther King Jr.'s ideal of a world where people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It was a way to say that you weren't interested in what people looked like or where they came from and that you would try to treat everyone with respect and dignity, rejecting stereotypes and focusing on building relationships with people based on who they are as individuals. It means that hobbits could become heroes. I can't carry it for you. But I can't carry you. It means that elves and dwarves could become friends. I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with an elf. What about side by side with a friend? And it means that men are not doomed to share the failures of their ancestors. We can all become better people by choosing to follow a different path. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. This day we fight! People are defined by their actions and their beliefs, not by the color of their skin or where their ancestors came from. In fact, I would point out that nearly every hero in the Lord of the Rings is an individual who goes against the traits that define their race or ethnicity. Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Mary and Pippin are adventurous, courageous and strong-willed. Gimli Glowenson is honorable and learns to trust elves like Legolas. Aragorn is supremely conscious of the dangers of power and does not seek it for himself, even though he could have easily claimed the throne as King of Gondor any time during his long life. Legolas is, okay, well, yeah, he's still pretty much a perfect elf. Anyway, I think it would be reasonable to look at this and wonder if part of Tolkien's point with his series was that even though we might stereotype people as representatives of their collective group, the individuals matter. Hobbits really are amazing creatures. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month and yet after 100 years, they can still surprise you. These are the ideas that I had ingrained in me from an early age. And I was never told to simply ignore the unsavory parts of the past. We shouldn't. After all, why would anyone want to prevent schools from teaching the true history of the Civil War or the Trail of Tears? Answer, no one actually does. But plenty of people want to prevent activists from teaching their kids that their skin color or ethnic background will permanently determine how far they get in life. Plenty of people want to stop their kids from being taught that most of their classmates are responsible for historical injustices that they had no part in. Plenty of people want to make sure that their kids aren't being told to see their world as us versus them. It is sad that we are even contemplating something like critical race theory where children will be separated by their skin color and deemed permanently oppressors or oppressed in 2021. That is not teaching the truth unless you believe that whites are better than blacks. The Lord of the Rings isn't colorblind. A lot of old movies and books aren't. They reflect the ideas of their authors and the times they lived in. But that doesn't make them irredeemably bad. We don't need to alter them or try to harass people who like them. Assuming incorrectly in the vast majority of cases that they like them because of their worst qualities instead of their best. What we need to do is learn from them. We can choose to see their flaws as opportunities to do better and be better in our own lives and in the stories we tell each other going forward. We can reject their worst values and adopt their best. You aren't doomed to be stuck with the beliefs of your ancestors. And just because someone looks vaguely like you doesn't mean you have to think the same way they do or do what they did. You may not get to choose who your parents and grandparents were, but you do get to choose what you believe and so does everybody else. And please don't trust anybody who tells you otherwise. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. Like I said at the beginning, I'm sure there was a lot in here that you're all going to want to debate and I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about it in the comments. If you want to participate in even more discussion, please join us on Discord. Also, check out our Behind The Scenes podcast. The audio is available all over the place, but if you prefer a video version, we've set up a YouTube channel just for that. It comes out every Friday, but our Patreon and Subscribestar supporters get early access, swag, special bonus content and a private channel on Discord. And speaking of our supporters, I especially want to thank our associate producers. To Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor and Vega Starlight, thank you. Find the links to support the show and everything else I talked about in today's episode in the description below. And as always, be sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel, ring that bell icon, join our email list and look for Out of Frame accounts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. See you next time.