I'm replying here to some of John V. Halbrooks’s good questions on Tolkien and racism, which he posted on his class blog and in the comments section of this post at Richard Scott Nokes's Unlocked-Wordhoard. My response grew too long to post in Prof. Nokes blog, but I didn't want to trim it, since two points I want to make are that these questions can’t be answered simply, and that some complex answers (though not the last words) have already been offered. Tolkien’s attitude toward and presentation of race, subjects of strong debate since at least the 1970s (or did Catherine Stimpson get there by 1969?), certainly continues to hold our attention; there are, for example, at least nine Tolkien Encyclopedia articles which address the issue in whole or part: Easterlings; German Race Laws; Judaism; Philo-Semitism; Race and Ethnicity in Tolkien’s Works; Race in Tolkien Films; Racism, Charges of; Saracens and Moors; and The South. I’d like to respond by looking at what some others have said about the subject, focusing on a few online discussions from the past four years at TheOneRing.net’s Reading Room forum. Some links and excerpts follow, as briefly as I can manage. But this is not an exhaustive survey of the topic, not even as considered at that one discussion board:

In August 2002, Huorn asked whether Tolkien’s portrayal of the Haradrim is racist, and kicked off a lively debate here (transcribed for easier reading here – scroll about two-thirds down the page, otherwise devoted to a concurrent discussion of “The Drúedain” from Unfinished Tales, about which more later). In response, Moriel mentioned “the history of the Second Age where we learn that the (white) Númenóreans fell into evil and sailed to Middle-earth as conquerors, attacking and enslaving the (‘swarthy’) peoples of southern Middle-earth”, while Curious argued that Tolkien wrote “a legend for his homeland of England, and in that legend the men and hobbits of the northwest portion of Middle-earth, which most closely resembles England, are the heroes.” Curious went on:

On the other hand Tolkien parodies racism and regional prejudice when he has the hobbits from the Shire speak disparagingly of the hobbits from Buckland, or about anyone not from the Shire. The fact that Gollum is a hobbit, that the Lord of the Nazgûl is a Númenórean, and that Saruman is a wizard shows that the hobbits and Dúnedain and wizards are just as capable of evil as anyone. In the LotR appendices, when Tolkien tells of the kinstrife in Gondor, the racists, who do not approve of intermarriage with ‘lesser’ races, are the usurpers, and are proven wrong.

However, Froda protested, “There's no question that LotR purveys and elaborates, and probably even helps further popularize, some not so nice stock images of the northern European imperial racial imagination … the association of stuff like darker skins & ‘slanted’ eyes, or southern or eastern provenance with Otherness – often given a scarily negative spin, linked with slavery, lack of full personhood, inscrutability and so on.” On the other hand, she continued:

But to say that Tolkien is ‘racist’ and leave it at that strikes me as too much, or at least too simple. He's quite critical of racism at times, and even of certain kinds of colonial empire. But more important, the narrative of LotR gives us other possibilities – like Gimli’s and Legolas’ ability to overcome racial stereotyping & to appreciate their elvish/dwarvish differences . Critics will still say that the so-called racial differences are still there in the narrative, and that they are even supposed to be biologically based (I said that Tolkien was old-fashioned!), but it’s still clear that JRR wasn't an old-line racist, abhorring x-racial understanding & relationships. He presented a beautiful vision of an over-arching fellowship that transcended such differences in service of a higher end.

NZ Strider added a reminder that Tolkien comments in his Letters (#210) that the orcs’ features are unlovely “to European eyes”, and suggested that had Tolkien “been writing a mythology for, say, Japan, his Orcs would probably have been tow-headed beanpoles with big, bulging eyes”. In fact, as NZS observed, Tolkien’s Dunlendings pejoratively call the Rohirrim “strawheads”. Furthermore:

[N]either Tolkien nor his best characters (e.g. Sam) ever forgets that they are all humans. Gamling calls the Dunlendish language ‘an ancient tongue of men’; Aragorn offers the Dunlendings (and the Orcs!) one final chance from the walls of the Hornburg. Faramir, when he explains to Frodo the three-tiered
classification of Men to Frodo (high [Gondor] - middle [Rohan] - low [Drúedain & Dunlendings]), concedes almost immediately that in his opinion it really doesn't mean much. If Gondorians once were ‘higher’ than Rohirrim, they’ve come down by now. As for the Dunlendings, Gamling and Aragorn have established that the Dunlendings are neither better nor worse than the Rohirrim; and Ghân-buri-ghân will teach Éomer and Théoden that the Drúedain are no less human than they.

And noting the much-cited scene where Sam is confronted with a dead Southron soldier, NZS concludes:

Sam takes one look at an enemy and recognises immediately the enemy’s humanity. Tolkien does present the human species as divided into visually distinct ‘racial’ subtypes – which, frankly, on one level is simply verisimilitude –; but Tolkien never loses sight of one simple thing: they're all equally human.

Because of this, NZS argued that Tolkien, though “a product of his time”, could transcend his age’s ideas of racial hierarchy. But what about the very idea of race, still widely held today? In a February 2004, an article on race-based medical research prompted Curious to revisit the question of Tolkien and race here: “Well-intentioned racialism survives”. Key passage:

This is the kind of error (and I do believe it to be an error) I see reflected in Tolkien’s invention of races and sub-races – not an attempt to prove the natural superiority of any one race, but a mistaken belief that there is such a thing as race, and that it is not merely a cultural invention. As the article below shows, it is a mistake that well-intentioned and well-educated people still make today, let alone in Tolkien's time.

The passionate discussion that followed is transcribed here. It was remembered in January 2006, when a little-discussed aspect of race in Tolkien’s work came up in a discussion of LotR’s “The Ride of the Rohirrim”: what of the Woses, and their history of being hunted by the folk of Rohan? Atlas wrote:

It constantly amazes me that even though people get worked up over descriptions of Men of the East and South being described as ‘swarthy’ or ‘dark’ and being on the wrong side elicits accusations of racism, or racialism, against Tolkien, but a clear example of Northern people deliberately waging a genocidal campaign against a native population always fails to generate any outrage at all. Everyone reads over this passage and shrugs their shoulders over the Rohirrim engaging in a bloodsport at the expense of the Woses…. Many get all lathered up and angry that Tolkien would make the bad guys have something other than lily-white skin, but yawn over the one example of truly awful behaviour by the good guys.

A heated discussion followed (transcribed here). Curious had one of the more interesting responses:

[U]nder King Elessar’s enlightened rule they will simply be left to themselves, undisturbed by other races. Doesn't this bear some resemblance to the ideal (as opposed to the reality) of segregation or apartheid? Isn't it a philosophy of ‘separate but equal’? Doesn’t it bear a resemblance to the ‘back to Africa’ movement that Abraham Lincoln and Marcus Garvey endorsed? Doesn't a fantasy based on the notion of race tread on dangerous ground, especially now that we understand the inherent dangers of the most ‘enlightened’ kind of racism? Not every racist is genocidal, and it seems to me that racism is a dangerous doctrine no matter who espouses it, and even if we encounter it in the realm of fantasy.

Squire countered that, “the causes and bases of real racism are far too deeply imbedded in our society for us to start eradicating them by worrying about a patently unreal work of art like Lord of the Rings!” But he found another aspect of the portrayal of the Woses unfortunate: “the clichéd pidgin that Ghân-buri-ghân speaks”. He continued:

I find it ridiculously crude in execution, and too reminiscent of the worst kind of ‘red-Indian’ gibberish used by Fennimore Cooper, whom Tolkien read and enjoyed as a youth. Thank god Tolkien never felt compelled to have one of his Haradrim or Easterlings speak, or we might also have had to read a mock-Arab or mock-Asian accent of the most hackneyed pulp-novel variety.

Somehow that led to comments on Jar-Jar Binks and V.S. Naipaul; and then to connections between Sauron’s forces and 1930s pulp fictions of “The Eastern Menace” and “The Yellow Peril”; and also to the bowdlerization of race in later editions of the Nancy Drew mysteries. But repeatedly the debate returned to Curious’s uncomfortable questions:

You may laugh it off, but works of literature have an immense influence on impressionable minds, and I don't just mean children. This is what attracted Tolkien and Lewis to popular fiction, what excited them about it. And they were incredibly successful at making their fantasies our fantasies.
Tolkien was far more successful at hiding his agenda than Lewis, though. He absolutely buries any hint of allegory. But what about unconscious biases that may have been hidden to Tolkien himself?

The Woses were again the topic of discussion early in October, in a new discussion of “The Drúedain” from Unfinished Tales. For those who have not read this tale: after LotR was published, Tolkien returned to the Woses and decided that they should appear in “The Silmarillion”, as a people associated with the folk of Haleth (the smallest of the three noble Houses of Men), acting as guardians with magical powers. But in contrast to NZ Strider’s argument from 2002:

I find it immensely interesting that he actually cared this much about the ‘uncivilized’ inhabitants of the Drúadan Forest to work them into the stories of the First Age and to give them this much of a ‘backstory.’ In light of the discussion of Tolkien's possibly racialist views a few threads below, I'd like to add here that almost no other author, after having written in a bit-part for some ‘semi-barbaric’ tribe, would have insisted on their having a dignifying history which went back this far and would have set them on a par with the other three tribes of the Edain in the way in which Tolkien does here.

Squire responded with this:

I’d like to propose that if the Wild Men of Drúadan Forest in LotR draw to some degree on traditional European racist images of ‘savages’, then the Drúedain of Beleriand in UT draw on a more subtle but still racist tradition, that of the ‘tamed savage’ as ‘faithful servant’….
But it’s a fantasy, a literary fantasy, of course!
Just so – except that this is also the fantasy that so many masters have had in our history: that their impassive servants of exotic race were happy and contented and loved. Literature has supported this fantasy for ages. It has had cruel consequences in the real world.

Unsettled questions, then. I don’t have better answers than these, though I will briefly address one other point Halbrooks raises: the orcs. Are they irredeemable, as you say? An old issue, and one which since the appearance of Morgoth’s Ring in 1993 is known to have confounded Tolkien himself. It’s the subject of a debate currently underway, actually, in which it is argued that orcs are practically beasts:

Tolkien's orcs are perhaps the least self-aware creatures one can imagine who also happen to use logic and language. They are completely blind to the objective reality of their world, and completely helpless without others to think for them. Left to their own devices when Sauron is defeated, they throw themselves off cliffs. Left to their own devices to a lesser extent when Sauron is distracted, and they kill each other in a frenzy of mutual destruction (in the Tower of Cirith Ungol). [Curious]

That they are independent agents:

We might conclude that they are therefore never really free of Sauron, and so have no Free Will in any meaningful sense. But this gives Free Will a moral, and not a deterministic, component that I don’t think it has…. Frankly, orcs would not be believable or interesting antagonists if they did not have Free Will. Their evil natures are deeply conditioned – and there’s no real profit to having an orc change sides, as the story is structured. But that’s not to say that an orc couldn’t change sides. [Squire]

And that their status is deliberately ambiguous:

I'd say that the narrators of the tale do not know whether orcs have souls or not, but see them as beyond any redemption that they are capable of. From the point of view of the tale, then, they are irredeemable, less than human. Yet there are clues that all is not as the protagonists of the tale believe. The orcs sound remarkably human at times, and although they are mean-spirited and totally downtrodden, they seem to share our morality.[FarFromHome]

Thanks to Halbrooks for some stimulating questions.