Jamelle Bouie on casting the world of J.R.R. Tolkien:
I don't actually see anything racist or prejudiced about exclusively cast light-skinned people for a fantasy series that is heavily steeped in Nordic and Anglo-Saxon lore. To draw from a brief conversation I had with Shani Hilton on the subject, with Middle-Earth, Tolkien tried to create a native mythology (of sorts) for the people of the British Isles. Given the creative vision of the films -- as close to Tolkien's depiction as possible -- I don't think it's unreasonable to restrict casting to light-skinned people, just as it wouldn't be unreasonable to only cast light-skinned people for movie adaptations of Beowulf, the Kalevala, or any one of the Celtic and Irish myths that Tolkien drew on for inspiration.
I'm more amenable to this argument in the casting of historical epics than fantasy epics--casting Denzel Washington as Thomas Jefferson would be strange, but I'm not sure how that standard applies to ahistorical fantasy worlds. Shani Hilton writes that Tolkien "was writing about white people for white people, the way that people can when they don’t have to think about the fact that they’re white." The problem with this argument is that it's premised on a very modern understanding of race in which whites of any descent are interchangeable. If all of a sudden Peter Jackson was bitterly resisting any effort to cast white non-Britons in any roles that might be an excuse, but that's not what's happening. I don't understand why an audience that can suspend disbelief about old men tossing fireballs, armies of malevolent green-skinned orcs, and the greedy machinations of centuries-old dragons would somehow find that the illusion falls apart as soon as you throw a brown hobbit in there. That seems a little selective and patronizing.
The Nordic-inspired fantasy culture of Tolkien, or even Beowulf, is no less alien to a white kid in an American classroom than a black kid in that same classroom. An ability to catch a sunburn is not a mutant power that bestows a flawless insight into the nuances of Old English. I'm sympathetic to Bouie's argument that people of color need their own epic fantasy stories, but one of the inadvertent side effects of colonialism is that the Western canon now belongs to a multiracial West. That minorities have a kind of cultural access to wider Western culture while retaining a kind of cultural specificity that remains opaque to most whites is simple double-consciousness.That's why Avery Brooks can play the hell out of Oedipus Rex, while casting Edward Norton as Walter Lee Younger would arch a lot of eyebrows.
And yes, that's Bad Santa's Tony Cox playing a Nelwyn warrior in Willow. Apparently adding a black character to a Tolkien-inspired rip-off didn't ruin the movie.
