Is Lord of the Rings Racist?

This is based on an answer I posted on Quora.com in 2022.

Given his situation and character, I think Tolkien, like a great many other whites in 1940s Britain, never thought much one way or the other about non-whites. They just weren't on his radar. He was a white writer, writing in a massively white country, for a white audience.

BUT, if you want to know how Tolkien felt about racism, there are two things to know:

There's that letter he gave his publisher to forward, if they chose, to a German publisher (in the Nazi era, just before WWII) that asked if he was arisch ("Aryan," a word which Tolkien well knew the technical meaning of, before the Nazis took it over.) In the stuffiest, stiffest British manner possible, he replied:

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

Now, let's look at race relations depcited in the story and the implied judgments passed on them:

The viewpoint characters are all of a disregarded minority (hobbits).
The good-guys are good, and only come to win, because they cooperate across social barriers:
- Elrond announces that the members of the Fellowship are specifically chosen to represent all the Free Peoples.
- Gimli, with Galadriel and then Legolas, breaks down the old barrier between elves and dwarves
- The men of Dunharrow, who turned on the Rohirrim, are shocked when the Rohirrim don't retaliate.
- Theoden, the King of Rohan, is aided by the wildman woses, long disdained by his people, and swears peace with them
The village of Bree and the Breeland is uniformly described in positive terms and is a unique, two-species community.
The one time non-white humans show up in the book, during a military incursion into Ithilien, Sam sees a slain warrior from the south, reflects that the man doesn't look evil, and wonders if the guy wouldn't rather have stayed at home in peace, but got swept up in the wars, just as Sam has been.

So Tolkien shows by example, within his setting, that inclusion is the way to go.

I suspect that the people who don't see the anti-racist message miss it because these aren't their races, or, if not their own races, the races they are mainly concerned with. Which betrays a certain lack of imagination, I think.

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