Dark Skinned People were in Europe BEFORE Light Skinned, So Can We Stop Bitching About Black Hobbits and Dwarves?
If anything, it’s more historically accurate to have races with all skin tones in them than have them be all white.
I haven’t watched Rings of Power yet because, honestly, it feels like a cash grab, but I’ll most likely get around to it at some point.
However…I am utterly exhausted and tired of the whole “making X character/species/fictional race/fictional character/ black instead of white is just them being ‘woke’ and pushing the evil liberal agenda of putting more colors on my screen and forcing me to deal with the fact that white people aren’t special so WAAAAAAAAA” attitudes I see all over social media.
In general I am tired of fandoms, but this is so loathsome, tiresome and we all know it’s about racism whether or not they admit it. So….as is my stock and trade…here are facts.
GUESS WHAT FOLKS!!???!! DARK SKINNED PEOPLE WERE IN EUROPE BEFORE LIGHT SKINNED PEOPLE WERE!!! (sharp gasp) What??? White people didn’t spring up out of the pure untainted earth in Europe and claim an entire continent for themselves? We didn’t just magically appear on white stallions to grace the lands around us with civilized manners, tea time and the ONLY form of culture, religion and modern societies on the planet?
No…white people did not.
As a matter of fact, dark skinned people were there millennia before white skinned people were.
Now genetic research has revealed that ancient European populations were dark skinned for far longer than had originally been thought.
Genetic analysis has shown that hunter gatherers living in Spain up to 8,500 years ago still had dark skin.
It was not until 7,800 years ago, when the first farmers migrated from the Near East through Turkey that two key genes that provide lighter skin appeared.
Two of the genes were associated with producing light skin — SLC24A5 and SLC45A2.
They found that the remains of early hunter gatherers who lived in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary around 8,500 years ago, they lacked these key gene variants.
However, in the remains of hunter gatherers that had lived in Motala 7,700 years ago, they carried both variants of SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 that produced lighter skin.
They also carried another gene known to produce blue eyes in Europeans.
Surprisingly they found a fourth set of genes in the DNA from these people suggests these people may actually have been related to people living in East Asia at the time.
‘But from ancient DNA it now looks like the first farmers in mainland Europe were still relatively dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and lacked the ability to digest milk properly until only about 4,000 years ago, while contemporary hunter-gatherers in Scandinavia may have been lighter-skinned but with a surprising frequency of a gene found in oriental populations today, suggesting they would have resembled them in hair form and the distinctive morphology of their front teeth.
‘Ongoing selection, for poorly understood reasons, seems to have maintained large stature in northern Europe after the arrival of farming, while progressively reducing it in southern Europe, especially Iberia.’
Dr Nina Jablonski, a paleoanthropologist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the research, told the journal Science: ‘What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of de-pigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes.
Here’s the Science.org article about the same study.
And guess what??? Artwork of dark skinned people from all over Europe exists…although (click the link for several portraits) FOR SOME REASON WE’VE NEVER SEEN IT IN SCHOOL BOOKS OR MUSEUMS??
Famous Europeans with African ancestry (1500–1900)
Below I will list some of the most famous figures of European modern history (after 1500) who happened to be black or have African ancestry, but were integral parts of European (high) society. Most of the time the African ancestry of these people is ignored by history books although acknowledged and accepted by most history scholars. I think it throws a new light on the concepts of race and the meaning of blackness in the 21st century.
If you really want to get into it, here’s a 147 page PDF re: an exhibition titled “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe”
Now, coming back to the outrage over fictional characters/races/creatures being portrayed with dark skin.
- Tolkien most likely saw black people in his life.
- If you want to pull on “Well actually LOTR is based in Europe and around European culture so no black people”, well, actually, you’re full of crap and are wrong and there’s actual artwork to prove it.
- There is no logical reason an entire planet of people that have many races with various different evolutionary needs to survive would all evolve as white skinned, Nordic looking creatures. If you want to be “realistic” look around at our own planet and then, please, stfu.
- Stop pretending only white people have good stories. I know a lot of these LOTR fanboys watch Asian media etc. so they know better.
- I want to come back to the controversy surrounding casting Scarlett Johannsen in Ghost in the Shell. It was interesting to me so many white people were calling it white washing when if you look at all the source material the Major isn’t expressly Asian looking, neither are several of the other characters and even most Asian people were fine with it. Yet here we have white people freaking out about an entirely fictional world having dark skinned people in it while at the same time trying to say that the Major in Ghost and the Shell should have been cast with an actor of Asian descent. Really? Double Standard Much?
Where does this leave us? Here. If the work is a fictional character then yes, you can cast people from all different races to play it. See Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
If the work is about a historical character, then yes, you better damn well cast the correct race actor for the character.
No race has sole ownership of fictional creations, none. And don’t even get me started on how Christianity white washed their own Savior.
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