I'd like to quote what someone said over at her blog that I think captures my own feelings on this:




It's easy to take offense when your world-views are challenged. Very few are proud of their prejudices, but almost as few don't want to admit that they have any. The difference between having social/ethnic prejudices and racism, however, is that one can be held without that other person being at serious danger of her life being threatened or loss of status occurring while the other has a whole social system that subconsciously reinforces that view.

I can be quite prejudicial toward Yankees and the English, but due to being relegated to "other" categorization (Southerner, Irish/Cherokee), it will hardly affect status. But tell a Mexican joke or make a comment about women and/or gays/lesbians and there's a bit more weight behind it, because of how those views have been institutionalized at various times in American (and by extension, Western) history. That's my response to the issue of whether or not the blogger in question can be "racist" or not. She may hold prejudicial views (who doesn't), but they are hardly "racist" if they aren't institutionalized to some extent.

As for Tolkien, are his views any different than how many of us (or our family/friends) are when it comes to someone of a different ethnic/social background? That's the real issue, I suspect and I would answer "Not really." I have my own race/class-based prejudices to work on, so why is there such defensiveness when it comes to the fact that an author made some comments and wrote some characters that current readers may find to be objectionable? Best to work on removing those specks from our eyes, I think.