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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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A neologism (or a new meaning for the word?) that I have begun to see everywhere and has really started to annoy me is 'anti-racism'.

The annoyance began when I noticed the term being used in places where it was anachronistic. Two instances that I remember were the Wikipedia pages of "Pepsi" and "J.R.R Tolkien". Pepsi's article describes Pepsi's early attempts to advertise to black people as an untapped market as an "anti-racism stance". Tolkien's article states that "scholars have noted... he was anti-racist." After some digging around in the edit history of Pepsi's article, I found that the term 'anti-racist' was only added to the Pepsi article in mid-2018, and to Tolkien's article in early 2021.

"Anti-racism" is a term popular within Critical Race Theory. It was particularly popularised and entered the public consciousness in large part due to Ibram X. Kendi's 2019 book How to be an Anti-Racist. Kendi defines "anti-racism" in that book as follows:

The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “anti-racist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.

According to Kendi, any racial inequity, or anything that results in a racial inequity is by definition racist, and in order to be an "anti-racist" you must support racial equity (i.e. forcing equal outcomes) for everything. A similar quote is from Angela Davis: "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

"Anti-racism" is a classic example of linguistic laundering/doubling, or linguistic motte-and-bailey, that is rife within woke/Critical Social Justice circles. The pattern is to take a word that has a plain meaning to the layman (anti-racist simply means against racism), and create a second specific, academic and ideological meaning for it. This second meaning is then smuggled into conversations and policy when the public naturally just assume the first, plain meaning. Ultimately, this is done for political and ideological ends. Manipulate people to get on board through the plain meaning (you're not a racist are you? You want to be an anti-racist!), then implement the ideological agenda, while maintain it is nothing usual because the word is the same. Other common words doubled in this way are the trio of diversity, equity, inclusion.

Critical Social Justice is the amalgamation of Neo-Marxism/Critical Theory, and Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism. Michel Foucault is the most cited scholar in history, and many other post-modernists, and Neo-Marxists top the list of most cited humanities scholars. It's hard to overstate how influential these ideas are currently in the humanities. Both Neo-Marxism but particularly post-modernism have an extreme focus on language. Language is the medium of power, and therefore, of oppression. It should not be surprising then that Critical Social Justice deliberately engages in such language manipulation as part of their political project, including engaging in historical revisionism to legitimise themselves.

With regards to Tolkien, the anti-racism thing has become a necessary defence because of people accusing him of anti-Semitism (the Dwarves are coded Jewish, you see, and only care about gold) and racism (the Orcs are black-coded, a thing I only read the other day). These people claim flat-out he was a racist (because old, white, Catholic, English guy who didn't write in trans queer BIPOC differently-abled characters in polyamorous gender-queer relationships, and I wish I was exaggerating greatly instead of only a little about that, See what Amazon thought would sell "The Rings of Power" to an audience with their English version of the superfans video. Would be a decent interview if all the references to 'representation' and 'queerness' were stripped out).

That's not even taking the quotes that we do see in the Selected Letters, which slightly better critics have used (the critics above just took a general statement that 'of course Tolkien is racist' and ran with it):

(1) From a letter of 1955:

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

See? He said the Dwarves were Jews (no, he didn't, but that doesn't stop the critics) and look what he says about Dwarves in "The Hobbit":

There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.

There you go: the stereotype of the Jews being money-grubbers! Anti-Semitism!

(2) From a 1958 letter about a proposed film of "The Lord of the Rings":

The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

That one will get you, whoever you are, into trouble. Is he saying that Orcs are Central/East Asians? No, but if someone reading that doesn't make allowances for "least lovely types", "to Europeans", and "degraded versions" of "corrupted human form", then they will get "Tolkien says Orcs are East Asians because East Asians are ugly slant-eyes". I honestly don't know where the "Orcs are black" thing came from, unless it's from the movie versions which are dark-skinned (some of them).

Racism simpliciter is also attributed to him because of the Haradrim and Easterlings: all the good guys are white, all the bad guys are black (or at least brown and yellow). We don't get any black or brown people on the side of the heroes. Never mind that he wrote a sharp letter to his publishers about a Swedish translator who was putting in his own interpretation of events everywhere:

From a letter of 1961

Here [in Mordor] rules the personification of satanic might Sauron (read perhaps in the same partial fashion [as other identifications Ohlmarks has made] Stalin).

There is no 'perhaps' about it. I utterly repudiate any such 'reading', which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought. The placing of Mordor in the east was due to simple narrative and geographical necessity, within my 'mythology'. The original stronghold of Evil was (as traditionally) in the North; but as that had been destroyed, and was indeed under the sea, there had to be a new stronghold, far removed from the Valar, the Elves, and the sea-power of Númenor.

And from a letter of 1954

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.

So was he a racist? By current 21st century progressive standards, yes (and sexist and homophobic, no doubt). Was he a racist by the standards of his day? I don't think so, but of course Bad Things Are Always Bad and there is no context, so he has been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty. Hence the necessity to use the shibboleth of "anti-racist" when trying to defend, or at least be neutral about, him.

The issue I had was the specific word choice of "anti-racist" and its ideological association. There are plenty of ways to word it without having to use the term "anti-racism", e.g. "he opposed racism," "condemned racist attitudes".

Prior to the changes to the page in 2021, that section on Tolkien just had examples of things he contemned, including his anger at the Nazis and his condemnation of the treatments of blacks in South Africa.

But I guess it might be some coded language. Maybe like another commenter suggested it was done by Amazon, maybe in an attempt to get activists of their back and signal to them "hey, we're on your side! Please don't attack us!"

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