Elijah Wood, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan reunited and published on social networks a photograph where they are seen with a t-shirt that shows different ears of different races of the universe created by Tolkien in different skin tones. Along with photography, launched the campaign “Everyone is welcome here”selling the t-shirts and giving 50% of profits to charity.
Ismael Cruz Cordóva, one of the attacked actors, thanked them with “much love” for the support to this group of actors. He recently addressed troll social media accounts expressing “pure hate speech” against him: “This is exactly why I fought to get this role. I felt like I could carry this torch and I made sure I played an elf the way it was meant to be because I knew this was going to happen.”
For its part, the official accounts of the series and Amazon Prime Video replicated Jen Salke’s sayingspresident of Amazon Studios, in the LA Times: “We are very proud of the cast that we have in this series. We encourage debate and criticism but in no way will we allow racist expressions of any kind.”
The current actors and actresses also put their words to repudiate this racist advance against their peers. In a statement they stated: “We, the cast of The Rings of Power, support each other in absolute solidarity and we repudiate the racism, harassment, threats and abuse of which some of our colleagues of color are victims every day. We refuse to ignore and tolerate it.”
“JRR Tolkien created a world that, by definition, is multi-cultural. A world in which free people of different races and cultures come together as a community to defeat the forces of evil”, explain the stars and insist: “Our world was never all white, fantasy was never all white, Middle Earth is not all white. People of color belong in this world and are here to stay.”
Finally, the cast sends love to the fans and especially “fans of color who are also being attacked for simply existing in this community”. The message spread on social networks closes with a message for these: “You are valid, you are loved and you belong. They are an integral part of the Lord of the Rings family. Thank you for always supporting us.”
The Lord of the Rings The Rings of Power.jpg
Amazon Prime Video
Why The Lord of the Rings is the victim of a racist attack
Like the movies directed by Peter Jackson, the series of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power shows different races such as humans, dwarves, elves, orcs and hairy, some predecessors to the Hobbits. But unlike the movies, the Amazon series is the first to have a racially diverse cast.
These aggressors take as reason for his racist attack that, according to them, JRR Tolkien never wanted to populate his Middle-earth with non-white characters. That is incoherent since the author avoids this type of characterization in his books and even, one of the few that can be found is when he describes the hairy ones as having “browner” skin than their descendants, the Hobbits.
The so-called fanatics argue that Tolkien, a white English citizen, created Middle-earth with European influences and that therefore hiring non-white actors It goes against the spirit of the books. They allege that people of color did not exist in medieval England (which is not true) or that it would be similar to a white actor wanting to be the Marvel hero Black Panther.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Tolkien’s blunt views against racism
Although many of these groups want to convert JRR Tolkien into an alleged white supremacist, the writer spoke at different times of his life against racism and I search prevent his work from being considered an allegory of some kind.
Around these new emergences, Sites specializing in his writings replicated some of his quotes on the subject. TheOneRing recalled that the writer was born in South Africa during apartheid and thought a lot about racial inequitiesfor example when receiving a request for “Aryan ancestry” by Nazi Germany when publishing his first books.
One of the most demonstrative with the intention of denouncing any reduction of their stories to a specific raceis part of a letter Tolkien wrote to Oxford University in which he taught: “I have a hatred of apartheid in my bones; and more than anything I detest segregation and separation in language and literature. I don’t care if you think any of these are White.”
Source: Ambito
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