Who cares. It’s fantasy.
It’s because it’s fantasy that people care.
Well, Captain America: Civil War had Black Panther, War Machine, and Falcon. I suppose you could argue that War Machine and Falcon were just in there because they were the Token Black Guys in two previous movies, but if that’s the case, then they wouldn’t have felt the need to add a new Token Black Guy, or to give him such a prominent role.
Written by a white upper class british person.
Yes they’re white. You’d have to show me where he intended anything else.
I agree with this, with the proviso that we need a helluva lot more fantasies that don’t draw on Europe for their background. It’s starting to happen, and it’s a really exciting time in fantasy lit for this (and other) reasons; but it hasn’t really made it to the big screen yet, where the fantasies we see still tend to be based on Europe.
As for the non-swarthiness of orcs, I’ll defer to people with better Tolkien knowledge than mine. It surprises me to hear he never describes orcs as dark-skinned; I suppose I got that impression from the various visual depictions of orcs I’ve seen.
I wouldn’t say that diversity just for diversity is a worthwhile goal. Every bit of casting should have some reason behind it.
The poster child for this - Hamilton notwithstanding - should still be Branagh’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in which he casts Denzel Washington as Don Pedro, the man in charge of everything. Washington fills the role masterfully. He is the man in charge, knows it and all defer to him. It was an inspired choice.
As for Sam being ‘brownish’? That’s less about ethnicity than class. Sam is the only working stiff in the bunch. That means he’s outside in the sun getting a tan. The rest of the hobbits, Bilbo, Frodo, Merry and Pippin are the gentry of the shire. None of them work for a living, instead their time in the sun is limited to bracing walks and reading in the shade of trees. Sam is our window into how the common hobbit thinks and acts.
Yes, the orcs refer to the Rohirrim as white-skinned, but even the other humans do the same. The Rohirrim are unusually pale as humans go. Of note, though, the Rohirrim are not stated to be superior to the other nations of Man: They have a history of being allied with the Good Guys, but that’s not anything inherent. The Numenoreans are superior to other humans, but I don’t think that anything at all is said about their typical pigmentation, beyond that (like everyone else) they’re at least somewhat darker than the Rohirrim.
The only time that Uruks are described as “black” is the term “Black Uruks of Mordor”. This could describe their skin, but given that he’s talking about Mordor, I’ve always interpreted that to mean that they are Sauron’s, probably clothed in black armor, with black shields, etc.
As the link notes (it’s primarily taking from the Wikipedia description of Tolkien orcs), the only solid description of orcs as a whole we get is that they are “sallow-skinned”. That generally means sickly pale, or yellowish. This is no shock, given that they live underground. Obviously, there are different “breeds” of orc, as Sam and Frodo find out in Mordor; cf. the tracking orc.
It’s also important to remember that “orc” as used by Tolkien is basically his version of a “goblin”; indeed, in The Hobbit and even in LotR (primarily when the hobbits are doing the talking), they are called goblins and orcs interchangeably. Recall that the Battle of the Five Armies at Erebor was fought between the Elves, Dwarves and Men on one side, and the Goblins and Wargs on the other. So Tolkien is drawing upon a common northern-European idea, the goblin, a grotesque impish creature that be-devils people. He specifically mentions in at least one writing that he’s indebted to the concept of goblin depicted by George MacDonald (“Princess and the Goblin”), though as critics have noted, by the time he wrote LotR, he had abandoned the idea of orcs/goblins as being impish, comic creatures. Generally speaking, these creatures were not depicted as being “black” in the sense of black-skinned. See also references in Germanic literature to kobolds.
The tendency to portray orcs as black-skinned in the various movie adaptations I think stems from the fact that we see large black things as menacing (including these days cars with mostly black exteriors). What relationship this bears to our views of “blacks” I leave to those who wish to engage in the realm of speculation.
And then there’s Gollum- in The Hobbit he’s black with shining eyes, but in Lord of the Rings he’s described as black in some places and white in others.
Since Tolkien intended Middle-earth to be a long-ago precursor to what we now know of as Europe, it’s hardly surprising that all the stars of the Jackson movies were white. Several of the Lake-Town denizens in his Hobbit movies were non-white, however, perhaps implying that it was more cosmopolitan or drew from a larger geographic area than, say, Hobbiton, Minas Tirith or Bree.
Or, you know, when they filmed A Wizard of Earthsea they could have cast brown people because, outside of the Kargish people who are explicitly white, everyone in the series is brown or browner. But no… ! The leads wound up white folk. Now THAT was a problem.
It’s been awhile since I read Tolkien, but to my recollection while various ethnic traits wouldn’t be out of the question the setting is so very European that “mostly white” for the cast makes at least some sense based on the books themselves. It’s not as explicitly “white folks” as the tales of Robin Hood or the Knights of the Round Table (which, both taking place in England, pretty much means “pasty white folks”) but I think the recreational outrage is a bit misplaced.
Pasty white folk has the same cache as nappy headed black folk. Why use it?
That makes sense since Esgaroth (i.e. Lake-Town pre-Smaug), was a major trade center and crossroads, with traders coming from places like Dorwinion (on the edge of the M-E map) and beyond. I’ve not read a much of Tolkien’s notes and apocrypha, but other semi-official source materials (such as Cubicle 7’s The One Ring RPG make it clear that there is a whole lot of Middle-Earth that goes beyond the map seen in LOTR.
When Tolkien created Middle-Earth, his goal wasn’t to write fantasy novels, but to ostensibly create a new mythology for England, heavily drawing upon the Norse, Germanic, and Celtic. As Tolkien was also a pedantic linguist, he often used language in the way it was used in those times. When he wrote that someone was “dark” or “swarthy”, he might be well using those words in the way they were used in Norse sagas (i.e Svart- as in Svartalfheim, land of the dark elves).
Even in the movies, there a few (sickly, greyish, sallow-looking) pale orcs/goblins: Azog, Gothmog, the Goblin-King, and some of the Moria orcs (“Why can’t we have some meatss?..Ooh, they look fresh.”). In one of the extended edition DVD commentaries, the design team talks about Orc/Uruk-hai design. Since geysers of gushing, realistically-red orc blood could have jeopardized a PG-13 rating, it was decided to give the orcs black blood. Black blood influenced the design, as something with black blood would not have any reddish or pinkish flesh. If you look at closeups of featured orcs in LOTR, even the tongues and the gums will be dark-colored.
But they could just as easily made the blood, and thus the skin, green, as was done with Spock. 
Interesting - so Tolkien explicitly stated at some point that his stories were supposed to situated on actual planet Earth, not some made up alternative Earth-like reality or some such, but actual Earth thousands of years ago?
I did not realize that.
Race has history. As a rule, there shouldn’t be different groups of people with very different appearances living in the same place, because in a normal society, everyone has sex with everyone else and within a few generations everyone looks more or less the same. There are only two reasons for there to be distinct ethnic groups in the same location, and those are immigration or racism. Either you’re from somewhere else, originally, or your people are kept - or keep themselves - apart. So if you have a broad variety of ethnic groups in the same story, you have to ask a few questions, such as: where did Person A, or their recent ancestors, come from? Why are people who look like Person B treated differently and what impact does it have on the story? This is basic world-building, and can lead to some very interesting stories.
But just having people look different at random? That’s not diversity; it’s storytelling laziness.
Every once in awhile, someone tries to portray Tolkien as racist. 1940s attitudes were very different than ours, but it is clear that he was somewhat progressive on this issue for the time. He really hated Nazis and their racial policies, and also disliked their usage of “Aryan” for wonderfully pedantic reasons. Also he grew up in South Africa, and didn’t appear to like apartheid. I feel like he would’ve used similar thoughts to point out that Laketown et al. are “Europe,” but a particularly cosmopolitan town would be unlikely to be monoracial.
If there is any part where Tolkien seems out of place today, it’s in the very minimal female roles in his work.
My favorite is that Gaiman’s Anansi Boys was in talks to be a movie at one point. Most of the characters are explicitly black, but the suits were uncomfortable with the marketability and wanted to whitewash at least some characters.
Thats not how genes and phenotypes work and you should know. Places where there has been heavy “mixing” like the sub-continent, S America or the Levant and surrounding ME illustrate this well. After a few generations, when ethnic identities start changing, you see people of the same ostensible ethnic group began to display a wide variety of looks.
Look at Britain, which had several centuries of immigration from all four corners of the Old World during Roman times, then saw little of it for about a millennium. Red heads, blondes as well extremely swarthy dark headed folks, sometimes all in the same families.