Quotes & Links

This page first contains a short list of quotes by a authors and critics of racism in either the literature or the cinematic productions in science fiction.

Quotes:

" Concepts of race and racial images are both overt and implicit within popular culture--the organization of cultural production, the products themselves, and the manner in which they are consumed are deeply structured by race. Particular racial meanings, stereotypes, and myths can change, but the presence of a system of racial meanings and stereotypes, of racial ideology seems to be an enduring aspect of American popular culture." --Michael Omi in his book In Living Color: Race and American Culture (121)

"Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion.  He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups." --Dr. Shapiro, an expert in cultural studies, race and slavery, in his comments to rediff.com

"Maybe it was the way that all the baddies were dressed in black, or maybe it was the way that the fighting uruk-hai had dreadlocks, but I began to suspect that there was something rotten in the state of Middle Earth."--John Yatt in his article "Wraiths and Race" in The Guardian @ http://film.guardian.co.uk/lordoftherings/news/0,11016,852217,00.html

"[The] depiction of blacks is as hostile as anything one will find in the entire Howard canon. Phrases like 'black me, like giant, hulking apes'. . . are offensive to the modern reader. Blacks are depicted as bestial and subhuman, without redeeming characteristics, good for use as slaves, if somewhat too vicious to be readily managed."--Darrell Schiweitzer commenting on "Shadows in Zamboula" by Robert E. Howard

"A student who had not questioned or examined his own whiteness might well not think about the significance of equating evilness with "Black." But it certainly seemed to me that part of the origin of the Black Elves was in the genre itself. Certainly much of the fantasy I had written as a teenager and undergraduate was full of connections between evil and darkness. I began to think about the fantasy I had read and loved, and I was rather appalled to realize how ubiquitous the pairing between darkness and evil was."--Elizabeth Anne Leonard in "Into Darkness Peering"--Race and Color in the Fantastic

"Whether or not Howard himself was racist is impossible to determine with any certainty. One could compare him with H. P. Lovecraft, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other writers of popular fiction from that era and conclude that Howard was either better or worse than his contemporaries with respect to the then-faddish ideas of blood, race, and genetics. . . Howard certainly emphasized the purity of the racial bloodlines and the mongrelization of the races that came about through racial mixing, but he never presented a situation where a white race was mongrelized on account of its mixing with a black one."--Donald Hassler in Extrapolation on Robert E. Howard

Links:

 Archetypology 101: Fact, Fiction, & Fallacies: Who Are You?
  http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/archetypologyapr01.html

Archetypology 101: Fact, Fiction, & Fallacies: Episode 10 – Human, All Too Human 
 http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/archetypology19mar02.html

Archetypology 101: Fact, Fiction, & Fallacies: Episode 11 - In Closing... 
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/archetypology30apr02.html

The Lord of the Rings rooted in racism: Academic
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/jan/08lord.htm

"Wraiths and Race" by John Yatt in The Guardian
 http://film.guardian.co.uk/lordoftherings/news/0,11016,852217,00.html

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