[krapp]

Unfortunately that's really how Tolkien's mythology tends to work. White skin is associated with purity, darker skin with corruption and evil (or at least, between the two, "civilized" and "uncivilized".)

It's a trope that's carried on into sci-fi (particularly Star Trek, where the more animalistic or violent races also tend to be darker - see the Klingons who get portrayed as darker-skinned and more aggressive with each iteration) and related high-fantasy properties like D&D.

[peoplefromibiza]

> White skin is associated with purity, darker skin with corruption

it's the oldest metaphor in the world

it's light vs darkness, like white magic and black magic.

Heaven is light, hell is darkness.

Nobody sees "the dark at the end of the tunnel".

The idea that black people mean evil and white people mean virtue is a stretch of the modern thinking, by the same people that believe that blacklist comes from black people.

> where the more animalistic or violent races also tend to be darker

Not true.

Borgs, arguably the most dangerous species in the series, are white

Romulans are pale white.

Cardadsians are pale white too.

[dktokyo]

The Borg are all races and Romulans, though majority portrayed as white, likely have multiple skin tones the same way the Vulcans do. Though the idea they purged different skin tones at some point fits with their overall narrative.

All the Dominion races were white, more or less. The Changelings have a whole meta commentary going for them.

[ratsmack]

People see what they want to see and are offended by perceptions driven by their own biases, even in cases where no offense is portrayed or intended.

[krapp]

>it's the oldest metaphor in the world >it's light vs darkness, like white magic and black magic. >Heaven is light, hell is darkness. >Nobody sees "the dark at the end of the tunnel".

You seem to have confused "the world" for "Christian Europe." There are plenty of cultures in which these metaphors are reversed, or don't exist at all.

And the only referent that is relevant to this specific conversation is that of Tolkien, who himself described orcs thusly:

    squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

He's clearly not drawing entirely from "universal" metaphors of "light" and "darkness." And even if he were, mapping that to race is still ignorant and worth calling out.

>Borgs, arguably the most dangerous species in the series, are white

I wasn't talking about simply being dangerous, since in context even the Pakleds are dangerous (speaking of problamatic portrayals) so much as presenting depictions of animistic or "savage" behavior that hearkens to outdated racialist stereotypes of non-white cultures. The Borg are essentially a force of nature, so not relevant in that regard.

Fair point about the Romulans and Cardassians, although they're clearly metaphors for Colonial Europeans and Nazis respectively, and both are presented as clearly "civilized" in their behavior. Klingons drink blood wine, Cardassians drink kanar. The implications are still there.

[peoplefromibiza]

> You seem to have confused "the world" for "Christian Europe."

Not really

Yumboes are supernatural beings in the mythology of the Wolof people (most likely Lebou) of Senegal, West Africa. They closely resemble European fairies. Their alternatively used name Bakhna Rakhna literally means good people, an interesting parallel to the Scottish fairies called Good Neighbours. Yumboes are the spirits of the dead and, like many supernatural beings in African beliefs, they are completely of a pearly-white colour. They are sometimes said to have silver hair.

Chinese mythology has white foxes and white tigers.

There are similar examples in all the mythologies.

> He's clearly not drawing entirely from "universal" metaphors of "light" and "darkness." And even if he were, mapping that to race is still ignorant and worth calling out.

Tolkien was a well known anti-modern, Roman Catholic orthodox conservative.

But mongol-typed are not actually dark skinned, they were in fact often very pale in the past, and tbf he also wrote "degraded and repulsive versions of".

Same way I could say, as Italian, that "Jersey Shore" protagonists are a degraded and repulsive versions of Italians.

[krapp]

>But mongol-typed are not actually dark skinned, they were in fact often very pale in the past, and tbf he also wrote "degraded and repulsive versions of"

True, but Star Trek's treatment of the original Klingons was much the same, based on a vague archetype of "swarthy" Eastern "barbarians" like the Khanate or stereotypes of the Japanese during WW2. We're talking about broad-brush stereotypes here. There was no non-racist reason to make the Klingons dark-skinned to begin with. As has been mentioned, the Romulans were also a villain species and they were white (as a plot point, they looked exactly like Vulcans because they were the same species. The Klingons were dark-skinned because in Western culture dark skin is visual shorthand for "savage."

And portraying "degraded and repulsive" versions of a specific human race is the literal definition of a racist caricature. Especially if the point is to make them evil.

>Same way I could say, as Italian, that "Jersey Shore" protagonists are a degraded and repulsive versions of Italians.

... if literally every Italian in the show was portrayed that way, and was canonically in the Mafia. And the protagonists were all non-Italians. And when people were corrupted by evil, they turned more Italian.

[zdragnar]

There are plenty of counter examples within Star Trek of patently evil or aggressive characters and races being humanoid with light skin. This is purely your own projection.

[dktokyo]

Might have been true with Star Trek as of early TNG, but not sure it's been that way since. I imagine there was uproar around Tuvok being a black Vulcan, but would be hard to imagine Trek fans caring about that today.

[satyrnein]

This is correct, but what to do about it?

Just keep rolling with basically racist concepts because we like the other aspects of the mythology? Or explicitly overturn the racist parts, and keep the rest?

I like the second one, but apparently many other commenters are perfectly comfortable with "white=good".

[krapp]

D&D is at least trying to do the latter - they just issued an apology for the Hadozee - a slave race of monkey people for which the unfortunate implications are obvious. At least to some people.

Of course we're still left with the archetype of race mapping to moral alignment in general which is gross, but at least it's something.

And of course every single time anyone tries to decolonize (I'm going to use that word specifically because it irks certain people) fantasy and sci-fi, there's a controversy like the one we're in the middle of now. Some people have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

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