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Robin's avatar

I'm thrilled to find this post and wanted to share a group response I organized among the Tolkien scholars I know who shared my response of the importance of this essay as well as realizing what it reveals about academic Whiteness.

https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/13/

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Paul Croce's avatar

Thanks, Andrew,

Good job by you and Mills to use Tolkien thinking in story and assumptions to open up thinking about race and hierarchy.

It is interesting that “Middle-Earth is [so] meaningful to people of color. It seems for reasons similar to why non-whites identify with Bart Simpson: the non-mainstream, the prankster, the “non-achiever,” the street smart.

You write that “Christianity is white” and “whiteness is Christian” are and have always been factually false.” This is routinely overlooked by mainstream Christians and extremist white nationalists alike. Christianity was an import to Europe, a Middle Eastern immigrant. We pay little attention to indigenous spirituality in Europe, and if so, it is often ridiculed or patronized. Apparently, Europeans learned their colonialist ways the old-fashioned way, by passing forward their own experiences. And these days, there are major distortions of the “Christian West”; see for example, Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020); for selections, see and https://books.google.com/books?id=OMTnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false; and for a brief essay, see Kaufman, “Medieval History and Modern Hate,” University of Toronto Press blog, August 27, 2020, https://utorontopress.com/blog/2020/08/27/kaufman-medieval-history-and-modern-hate/

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