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I don't see what is creatively bankrupt about race swapping a character. And I don't see how or why doing so would indicate that they are out of ideas.
Aragorn, especially after the movies, is an icon and he is white. People who ingroup blacks as morally superior see positions of power and feel an emotional need to elevate blacks to those positions. People who outgroup whites as morally inferior feel an emotional need to lower whites from those positions.
Amazon, WotC and all the 'woke' engaging companies are not creatively bankrupt. They are not 'out of ideas'. They are simply exploring a vision, chasing a dream, following ideology, walking certain priors to their logical conclusion. It's not about writing an original story that no one cares about. It's about representing truth and justice. Black people are better than white people. They are morally superior. They have been standing up against the racist injustices of America and the Western world for centuries. They have been oppressed throughout that time yet have persevered through all of it. There is no good reason for the iconography of the modern era being white. There is no reason why it shouldn't be black.
If you don't care about race there is no reason to care about Aragorn being black any more than that there is reason for you to care that the hero is destined to become king. If you do care about race, whether you consciously recognize it or not, there are two extremely predictable emotional responses to this sort of thing. You either like it or you don't. You feel an emotional resonance with the fact that something of value was changed to elevate one over the other. You feel an emotional resonance with someone expressing group allegiance to one over the other.
All in all, this isn't a problem of creativity. It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.
Maybe I am misunderstanding your point, but couldn’t you try to be race neutral and therefore find people who believe in black supremacy repugnant? Maybe bring race neutral is “caring” about race but it seems categorically different.
In context I see it more as a bunch of white people proclaiming race neutrality whilst living in and perpetuating a profoundly racist society that marginalizes people who aren't white. With that in mind I'd say that these proclamations of neutrality are at best a cheap PR trick for the people that maintain and reap the benefits of said racist society whilst not wanting to own any culpability for doing so.
I'm not talking about 'black supremacy' as some ideology that says black people ought to be X because black people think so. I am saying that as a matter of historical fact black people have acted in a morally superior way to white people. None of the advances in civil rights and liberties would have come about if it had not been for the black struggle against white supremacy. The bedrock of moral progress in America has always been its black soul.
To quote the television show Mad Men, “I don’t think about you at all.” The idea that the plight of black America is somehow the heart and soul of this country is laughable to most white Americans. To say nothing of Asian or Indian immigrants who make up an ever increasing share of our elite.
That isn't what they said. They said: "The bedrock of moral progress in America has always been its black soul." Your paraphrase is not even close.
How could it be the bedrock of moral progress if we don’t even think about them? That’s my point we’ve been doing our own thing and their existence is an after thought. It’s as ridiculous to think the moral universe revolves around black Americans as it is to think the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Its a historical claim. About what, historically, has been the source of moral progress. Just as one might argue that physicists have been the source of material progress, even though most people don't think about them either. Whether it is true is, of course, a different question.
And, you know who else whose existence is an afterthought? Quakers. Yet, it is perfectly possible to argue that, they, historically have been a source of moral progress. And, no one thinks about the Irish much, but it is perfectly possible to argue that they were the source of progress during one historical period.
Blacks were the recipients of moral progress in the West not the drivers. Physicists and engineers actually drove material progress. That's the difference.
Your point about the Irish isn't exactly wrong, the Irish monks certainly maintained classical works through laborious reproduction, but I find people lionizing their ethnicity as somehow world historically special a sad genre. People needing to look back at their 'ancestors' (these monks didn't leave any descendants) to feel good about themselves is kind of pathetic. Especially when the whole reason they are doing it is that their ancestors in the recent past were so pathetic.
I haven't made a point about the Irish. Nor a point about African Americans. I have simply tried to clarify the nature of the claim made by the OP.
But, in the substantive point, I took the OP to be referring to things like the Civil Rights Movement, where I think it is fair to say that blacks were the drivers of moral progress.
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