Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. Note that it's a myth that everyone in pre-modern Europe was white. This is a white supremacist trope easily proven wrong by, say, digging into the representation of POC in medieval European art. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-a…
That centers race a bit much. There weren't black people in medieval Europe, but nor were there white people. We're projecting contemporary racial categories onto a past where they didn't exist. The question of whether there were black people in Europe is akin to asking what did people there think of the USSR. That said, yes, people we'd currently code as black existed in Europe, though disproportionately in entrepot…
But there definitely were.[1]
Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to describe Eöl's son as having white skin. There's no reason to do that unless his son was notably distinct in this way from his father.