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Notes -
This is a great elucidation.
To tie it to the contention I brought up:
Should we sacrifice our preferred racial representation of Aragorn in the name of racial justice in America?
Considering that Aragorn is not real and considering the high stakes for real marginalized people in America, I'd argue you need a very good reason to maintain the preference for approach 2. And I'd argue that if you would elevate your racial preference in fantasy over the realities of the marginalized minorities in America, you are, at the very least, implicitly racist.
The thing is that the author gave us a description of Aragorn, and a setting, and that's not "21st century cosmopolitan multi-racial America".
It's like depicting George Washington as black - yeah, Hamilton got away with that, race-swapping the Founding Fathers, but in the end that was a gimmick and we all know that. Nobody believes Washington was really black. And if we depict Washington as black for one "real marginalized people", what about (Indian) Indians? Chinese? Hispanics? Where does it stop?
The better approach is to find real heroes, cultural or historical, from the marginalised peoples and elevate those.
And if saying "Fionn Mac Cúmhail was not born in Harlem as the descendant of West African slaves" makes me a racist, well then I'm a racist now, Father!
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Making Aragorn black does not advance racial justice, but rather erodes it. Racial Justice is not advanced by convincing everyone that race is very, very important and should be a major consideration in every decision. If you manage to convince people of this, they will center race in their decision-making, and you will have more racism, not less.
Benign neglect is the only workable option available here. If people actually start caring about race, Blacks are fucked, because their community-average behavior is so goddamn bad that no amount of propaganda will help.
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Aragorn is real as a part of culture and this is basically cultural appropriation. Except since Aragorn is copyrighted, the implication of cultural appropriayion is worse.
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