I’m pretty sure he describes the Southrons fighting against the men from Gondor as swarthy (and with red tongues, not that red tongues are a characteristic of dark-skinned people AFAIK).
Gollum and Sauron are both described as black (Sauron’s hand, anyway, is described as black by Gollum, though I wasn’t clear whether he was being literal or figurative).
Having just reread the books, I don’t think Tolkien was a racist, at all. That said, there’s lots of basis for speculation, so I also don’t think it’s a totally unreasonable discussion, if only because Tolkien generally uses the standard metaphors of light=good and black=bad. I don’t see any racial overtones in it, but accept that others might.
Note that I said “protagonists”, a word which does not apply to the Southrons, Gollum, nor Sauron.
Bor and his sons, leaders of a group of “swarthy” men, were faithful allies to the elves and dunedain. They perished in battle with Morgoth.
Scissorjack, meet Tolkien (forward to LOTR):
But in any case, Tolkien was right because he used the word “allegory” to mean a specific thing. Also see my posts http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12816647 http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8559897.
Yes, it’s generally not an approach I would use if I was interested in biographical material about the author.
You know, maybe part of the reason Tolkien’s protagonists fell on the light side of the spectrum was simply the same reason some people have problems telling those of another race apart: I know that for me it’s a lot easier to whip up six different descriptions of white people than of black people. I am more used to analyzing the looks of white people; when I’m describing people from a different ancestry, I may need to think about parts of their face or body that I would not normally describe for a white person - things I don’t even have an adjective for (my adjectives are very limited when it comes to “different shapes of black noses”, for example; I have a wider catalog for white ones).
Many (white, as are we) people have a similar problem simply when trying to describe which of my brothers did they run into… telling them apart is relatively easy, but describing them in a differentiated way? Well, let’s see: late 30s, same coloring, same build, same height, same weight but the weight is distributed differently (Middlebro is bonier, Littlebro is rounder) albeit close enough that they borrow each other’s clothes, and Middlebro has a sort of cave-in at the end of his breastbone. Ah but… that cave-in isn’t visible with most clothes, and the only other different point I can express requires me to express it as a comparison. I can’t describe them separatedly in a way that will make them sound different - the whole family has been trying it as a dialectic exercise for over twenty years.
Nowadays authors often feel the need to include token characters from races not their own (often without going into detailed descriptions), but back then it wasn’t something that came to mind. You didn’t need to try and ensure that your invented society, in an alternate universe, included a racial makeup that would be politically correct. It’s like complaining that Shakespeare’s works are racist, not because of some of the stereotypes he portrays, but because most of the characters are white. If he’d had a play set in Nubia, people would now complain that actors at the original Globe wore blackface…
If Tolkien is racist, then almost all fantasy and science fiction is racist. Simply having multiple races with stereotypes is not racism. It’s only racism if the specific stereotypes correspond with real ones, or we have other evidence that the author is a racist. And, in Tolkien’s case, we have evidence to the contrary.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. They make storytelling easier. Not every character needs to be fleshed out. Knowing that one group of people are generally bad guys makes it easier to focus on the more important things in the story. It does not mean that the author secretly (or not so much) thinks that there’s some real life racial counterpart.
The people claiming Star Trek is racist have more to stand on than this.