Reply #366: How they looked ...

[RoyGBiv]

Of course their visual depiction was not an accident. I'm not daft. Saruman's and the Ringwraiths' depiction wasn't an accident either. Nor was Frodo's nor Shelob's for that matter. Are the latter two insulting statements about the overindulgent eating habits of short people or suggestions that all spiders are in league with the devil and should be exterminated utterly?

IOW, what's your point? You say, originally, that the Orcs were racist. We boiled that down to the depiction of one variant of that type of character, and there's only one easily identifiable character among virtually hundreds of thousands that fully fits what you seem to find offensive. For the sake of exploration, I'll assume for the moment that you are entirely correct and that Jackson wanted that one character to come across clearly as comparable to a modern, muscular, dreadlocked black man. In the context of the entire movie, how, specifically, is this racist?

The question beyond the question is whether it is morally wrong to convey any negative depiction of any character that might, by some people, be associated with a real person or group of people. If that is the case, then every bit of narrative art must either forego physical description entirely, which does away with movies, or create an entirely fictional description that couldn't possibly be associated with reality. And at that point, I give up on humanity entirely.

Pardon me for saying so as I do not intend this as a personal slight against you and am finding this discussion at least somewhat instructive, but this is truly starting to remind me of a very brief -- because I quickly realized it was pointless -- argument I got into with a relative who believed _Beauty and the Beast_ was evil because it portrayed "bestial love." Yeah, okay, there was a suggestion of sexual lust between a "beast" and a human. Am I really supposed to take that as advocating screwing Rover?