Escaping the Echo Chamber

[Túrin Turambar]

In The Hobbit, the Dwarves make a living as craftsmen, living amongst non-Dwarves throughout Middle Earth. They are appreciated for their skill but distrusted by those they dwell amongst, and are on a quest to reclaim their lost homeland of Erebor. This matches fairly closely with Medieval European depictions of Jews. In Letter 176 Tolkien is explicit that this is intentional: " "I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue..."

Accordingly, he made the Dwarven language (when it appears) to explicitly follow Semitic patterns, as Quenya follows Finnish and Sindarin Welsh.

You can have a discussion as to whether this is racist. A modern author would undoubtedly think twice before basing his race of sometimes bumbliing, officious, cowardly and greedy characters on the Jews. Tolkien was writing at a time when this sort of stereotyping was normal and acceptable. The question is bigger than this particular example.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Sorry, yov, I really don't have the time now. There's been some academic work on the subject, which you could probably locate if interested.

N.E.B. mentions two pieces in a post above.

noting a couple works of Tolkien scholarship (by Rebecca Brackmann and Renée Vink) that argue both sides

Rebeccal Brackmann's piece "Dwarves are Not Heroes: Anti-Semitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien's Writing" can be read at: https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cg ... t=mythlore

I should note that I have posted elsewhere that I disagree with her conclusions.

Renée Vink's “'Jewish' Dwarves: Tolkien and Anti-Semitic Stereotyping" can be read at: https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/west-virgin ... pFQm6CfRko

I have not read that one.

There is a brief discussion here about John Rateliff's comments in The History of the Hobbit about this subject that be found at http://thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopi ... 066#p98066

There was another discussion in a different thread can be found at http://thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopi ... 61#p104261

[Beorhtnoth]

I haven't read all 54 pages. Was the echo chamber escape successful?

[Alatar]

Nope. A failed experiment

[N.E. Brigand]

In 2019, The Desert Sun, a local newspaper in Palm Springs, California, did an experiment: they stopped including opinion pieces on national issues for a month. As a result, readers apparenty became less polarized and paid more attention to local issues that were otherwise getting little attention.

[N.E. Brigand]

Tom Nichols, who teaches international affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island, last year wrote a book titled Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy. Today he discussed one of the points in his book, and I thought it was appropriate for this thread:

If you wonder why super-privileged kids or retirees in nice condos are so angry, it's because it feels *great* to be angry. Otherwise, life becomes about getting a job (if you're young) or just accepting the twilight of age. Easy heroism is crack to Americans raised on cable.

[Frelga]

A+ headline.

Johnny Depp says ‘no one safe’ from cancel culture as he accepts lifetime achievement award

The article, too, drives in the point while remaining drily factual.

[Alatar]

Thoughts?

Whoopi Goldberg suspended from The View after saying Holocaust ‘isn’t about race’

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/entertainment ... entnewsntp

I believe Whoopi was coming from a good place here and that one word would have made the difference. If she had said "isn't just about race" would people still have had an issue?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm a big fan of hers, and on some level I understand where she was coming from, but I also understand the outrage that her comments caused. And while I don't disagree that it would have been very different if she had said that isn't just about race, that is (in my opinion) a fundamentally different statement from what she did say. The Holocaust stems from the same kind of "othering" that slavery and the resultant history of discrimination against people of African descent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) comes from. They both comes from using false concepts of "racial" differences to raise one group over another.

I will likely have more to say about this, but I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks for raising the issue. It is an important one.

[Frelga]

I believe Whoopi was coming from a good place here and that one word would have made the difference. If she had said "isn't just about race" would people still have had an issue?

Well what else was it about?

[Dave_LF]

Politics? Sexual orientation?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't understand what you are trying to say, Dave. Can you explain?

[RoseMorninStar]

I'm glad you raised it too, Alatar. I was wondering what other people's take on this was.

I read something last night which gave me something to think about. The oppressors (Nazi's) believed that it was a race issue and they based their decisions and actions on that premise. That alone makes it a race issue no matter the opinion from me (or Whoopie) or anyone else today. (yes?)


There is a book I stumbled upon many years ago, 'The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell'. It made a huge impact on me. There is much written about the horrors inflicted upon the Jewish people who were overwhelmingly the target of the Nazi's most awful and desperate circle of hell, but the Gypsy Romani people were also targeted for complete extermination. Then there were others the Nazi's deemed 'inferior breeds', next on the list were Slavs. Then Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, homosexuals, etc.. Some of these people, in the deranged thought process of the 'superior' (gag) Nazi mind, would be suitable for slaves once they got rid of the leaders and those who were educated. Obviously these evil minds were hellbent on considering themselves superior and 'othering' everyone else as below them in some sort of social order. What is that, racism? Breed? A caste ordering? I don't know, it is likely best left to those who were targeted and affected to call it for what it is.

Frelga, I am guessing here.. I imagine from Whoopie's (perhaps understandable?) 'black and white' view of race issues that she and her people have suffered from, she views Jewish people as white and that perhaps she is thinking of the Holocaust as religious and cultural persecution. But that is only my guess.

*edited for proper term

[River]

The populations of the concentration and death camps were mostly Jews, but Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani, political prisoners and homosexuals also ended up corralled and dead. Antisemitism and racism were without question the primary motivator of the Holocaust (not only was that the motivation stated in historical record, but the justification for exterminating Jews was apparently WWI and all that followed was the fault of the Jews because reasons and everything would just be better if they were gone from the face of the Earth...bending logic to ideology leads to some horrifying results) but it wasn't just race and religion that made a group undesirable in the eyes of the Nazis and their sympathizers. They were trying to "clean" everything up. I think that's what Dave was trying to get at. Maybe Whoopi too.

[RoseMorninStar]

The populations of the concentration and death camps were mostly Jews, but Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani, political prisoners and homosexuals also ended up corralled and dead. Antisemitism and racism were without question the primary motivator of the Holocaust (not only was that the motivation stated in historical record, but the justification for exterminating Jews was apparently WWI and all that followed was the fault of the Jews because reasons and everything would just be better if they were gone from the face of the Earth...bending logic to ideology leads to some horrifying results) but it wasn't just race and religion that made a group undesirable in the eyes of the Nazis and their sympathizers. They were trying to "clean" everything up. I think that's what Dave was trying to get at. Maybe Whoopi too.

This is part of what I was getting at. Jews (and some others) had been targeted by pogroms for decades before WWII. Not only did the Nazi's want to 'clean things up' (ugh.. just to type that makes me sick) but to have themselves come out on top.

[Alatar]

I believe Whoopi was coming from a good place here and that one word would have made the difference. If she had said "isn't just about race" would people still have had an issue?

Well what else was it about?

I would have said it was as much about Politics and Religion as race. Although its a much less severe example (but then what isn't) Northern Ireland suffered decades of violence divided along religious lines, that were really more about politics, national identity and controlling interests. But Protestant vs Catholic is an easier label than Republican vs Unionist.

[Dave_LF]

I don't understand what you are trying to say, Dave. Can you explain?

It depends on what you define as a Holocaust death I suppose, but while race was the motivating factor in the bulk of them based on what I know, the Nazis weren't squeamish about sending white German dissenters, communists, gays, etc. to the camps either.

[N.E. Brigand]

Thoughts?

Whoopi Goldberg suspended from The View after saying Holocaust ‘isn’t about race’

I believe Whoopi was coming from a good place here and that one word would have made the difference. If she had said "isn't just about race" would people still have had an issue?

Would she even have been able to think much less say that? It would appear, based on what she said on The View yesterday morning and what she she said later that day on Stephen Colbert's show, where she went to explain (after having issued her apology) how she came to make this mistake, that she just didn't conceive of Jewishness was a "race". She said that, as she understood it, the Jews and the ethnic Germans murdering them were "two groups of white people." That's what she said on The View, and on Colbert's show, she said "as a Black person, I think about race as something I can see."

And it could be argued that the U.S. government partly agrees with her. In the decennial census, there are only five racial categories to choose from:

White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Black or African American – A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.

American Indian or Alaska Native – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

Asian – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

(Despite the Philippines being located in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. census counts Filipino-Americans as Asian. What about Indonesian-Americans? And is Australia considered a Pacific Island?)

Similarly the Jews article on Wikipedia doesn't use the word "race" at all; there the Jewish people are described as "an ethnoreligious group and nation". It wouldn't be surprising to find that Goldberg was never taught otherwise. I remember a family friend explaining, some 25 years ago, why she hadn't seen Schindler's List but was looking forward to Amistad, two movies from the same filmmaker about harrowing historical events. She explained that, as an African-American girl in a mostly white community with a substantial Jewish population in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she felt she'd had the Holocaust pounded into her in history classes while slavery was given relatively short shrift. It seems very possible that in many other communities teaching on the Holocaust was similarly perfunctory. And most people don't learn much about history after they finish school.

I might also note that at work, we've had extensive D&I aka EDI aka DEBI aka IDEA aka JEDI aka ABIDE training* over the past twenty months, and those efforts at rooting out vestiges of white supremacy have likewise focused most heavily on justice for BIPOC** people, and sometimes, it seems to me, explicitly at the expense of other groups. We're all still finding our ways around a shifting landscape. Colbert makes a valuable point (which will be familiar to some and novel to others) about the history that got us here. Regarding Goldberg's mistake, I saw someone else yesterday say that traditional Western categories like race or creed are no longer sufficient, which maybe sums up the problem as well as anything.

*A = Access, B = Belonging, D = Diversity, E = Equity, I = Inclusion, J = Justice. I have yet to see an acronym that uses all six.

**BIPOC = Black, Indigenous (and) People Of Color

Edited to add: For what it's worth, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement praising Goldberg's apology prior to her being suspended.

[RoseMorninStar]

Nice post N.E.

The word 'race' is the stumbling point, my guess is that many would think antisemitism, not racism. Most are aware and fully acknowledge that the Nazi's specifically targeted Jewish persons (and others) for horrors and extinction, but were not brought up as thinking of the Jewish people as being from a different 'race'. I was taught that there is only one race--the Human race and every thing else is social construct. But construct the Nazi's did. Sadly that doesn't stop Antisemitism, or 'racist' hate-if that is how they choose to construct it, or scapegoating, does it?

I view this (Ms. Goldberg's comments/apology) as a teaching moment and hopefully it has spurred many conversations because I've been quite disturbed by the acts of hate/hate crimes I've been reading about of late. Hostages and shootings in synagogues, hate fliers distributed to homes in Florida, Nazi rallies in Florida, Bombs threatening black people. Crimes against Asians/Pacific Islanders have risen 339% in the last year. It's just sickening.

[River]

She said that, as she understood it, the Jews and the ethnic Germans murdering them were "two groups of white people." That's what she said on The View, and on Colbert's show, she said "as a Black person, I think about race as something I can see."

This is a very American take on race. Among Europeans, it's a lot...messier. Race and nationality seem to get interlinked in ways we on this side of the Atlantic don't fully account for or comprehend. Marrying a Balkan opened my eyes to this. My husband has a friend who tried working in Switzerland and ended up leaving within a year because of racism against Slavs (this friend had a better experience in France, BTW, which has informed my husband's opinions of where in Western Europe he is theoretically willing to live). I got a fascinating reaction out of a German colleague when I mentioned I was married to a Serb. Like I'd just admitted to marrying my dog or something. Basically, Slavs and other Eastern Europeans occupy the same social position in Western Europe as BIPOC people do in the US. And then you can zoom in on, say, the Balkan peninsula (picked it because I'm familiar with it; there are plenty of other examples) and all kinds of other stuff starts to pop out, like, oh, saw, the entire break up of Yugoslavia. And, less headline-grabbing, how everyone else looks at Romanians and heaven help the Albanian who strays north of Kosovo and North Macedonia. So once you get your head around how in Europe, the white people have got themselves all sub-categorized, you start to see how Jews would get clumped into being their own race.

So, overall, yeah, Whoopi fouled up. But as a fellow American, I can buy her explanation.