Fellowship of the Fans

Harad - Wait? They're Whitewashed? (9/7/2022)

So—yeah.

Rings of Power which is promoting it's show whitewashed the Harad. And I'm actually surprised that more people haven't noticed.

Okay, so there are two characters from Harad who aren't whitewashed. We've got our healer and her son, though I do wonder when they made their casting choice whether they actually knew that the actress who plays Bronwen is of Iranian decent and they then cast her son based on that, because they might have not realized it as first as Bronwen is of light enough skin.

I hope not, particularly with a name like Nazanin Boniadi, but if they were thinking, "Oh, that's a Jewish name, and the Jewish people are white..."

Yes. Cringe.

Yes, there are people who think like this—thankfully it's a minority.

No, I don't want this to be the case.

But, um--

I can't help but notice that the rest of the Harad so far are white men and not people of color, and yet they somehow managed to ethnically cast the Harad correctly for one character and her child?

This is why you need to be careful with diverse casting, because a.) it looks like they ended up with an Iranian actress by happenstance and b.) yes, they did whitewash one of Tolkien's POC groups.

True, there might have been one I missed, but given the fact all the men in the bar are white (and the farmer looks white) and that was done to help emphasize a "white men are wrong for insisting we stop holding Black slavery against them" message.

"But Yemi, shouldn't Black people be paid restitution like other groups?"

I'm in the middle on this one as I don't see this as a black and white issue, but a super complex one I really don't want to go into beyond the fact there are pros and cons to each of the types of restitution and yes—there are different types of restitution. Sometimes it is a good thing, and sometimes it is a bad thing.

But is the problem really about restitution, or is it about something else?

Isn't what non-Black people are saying is this, "stop telling me I should be feeling guilty for my whiteness?"

And in that the message ends up backfiring majorly, because it's yet again saying, "people who aren't Black need to feel guilty for their whiteness."

"But Yemi, that's only aimed at white people!"

Is it? Because while for some that is the case, there have been non-white people who aren't Black told to check their white privilege, to feel guilty for the things they have, and even if this was just aimed at white people they still shouldn't be told they should feel guilty for the color of their skin, even if in the past Black people were made to feel guilty for their color of their skin. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Yet--

What makes matters worse in this case is the white people cast as the Harad are dirty white people in poverty, while the person they are confronting is an Elf with obvious privilege. So what this says is, "even after who is privileged and who isn't is reversed, we're still going to blame you and you need to put up and shut up because we are the morally right." Except, they're not, and add into the fact even non-white people who aren't Black are at times brought into this—yeah, not a pretty message.

Of course, was this intentional?

No.

I think they were trying to combat this idea that Tolkien made all the Harad evil in his work—which any Tolkien fan who knows his works knows there were good Harad, But there's this idea also behind this of sparing POC from being evil characters and getting special treatment behind this move, so it is not a good thing and doesn't excuse the whitewashing. It's one of the things Star Trek received criticism for Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan.

You just don't do it because even though the intentions are good, it ended up erasing rep.

So yeah, and add the message they slipped in about how people should just put up with being told they should feel guilty for their whiteness? And to do this, they whitewashed a race that wasn't white.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

This is the kind of problem we Tolkien fans were worried about happening when they started marketing Rings of Power based on diversity and the diversity being based on checkboxes rather than actually caring about diversity and rep.

Note - I decided to add a note at the bottom of this one because I realized that there are going to be some people that ask, "but are the Harad POC".  Uh, yes. He described them as such, as being brown and described them as black, which the latter would have come before Black was capitalized, although it would make sense in context for them to be described as Black.

But it's not, as I said a good thing, simply because Harad were evil in what we've seen adapted because that ignores what Tolkien said in everything else.