George Zimmerman. Plucky Hobbit, Awful Troll, or Wannabe Knight?

SPOILER ALERT for Game of Thrones

I've been thinking about how Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Game of Thrones (GoT) compare in terms of race, but the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin controversy seems to render that comparison trite.  But maybe not.


J. R. R. Tolkien grew up in an era when both physical and social scientists ascribed characteristics to people based on their national and racial origins (that kind of ascription has hardly disappeared).  Thus Middle Earth is thoroughly racialized, not just in the sense of different races of sentient beings (humans, elves, dwarves, etc.), but in how Tolkien defined the enemies of all the good "free folk."  Who sided with the Dark Lord?  Dark people--the "Southerners," the "Easterlings," the "swarthy" and the "slant-eyed."  The "black-skinned" orcs are irredeemably evil.  And on and on (you can see a debate about this at Tolkien Gateway).

As New York Times writer, Elvis Mitchell, hilariously suggested, Peter Jackson dealt with races in LOTR by turning them into yesteryear's rock bands:

Mr. Jackson apparently feels that the way to keep each of the fighting groups separate in the audience's minds is to provide them with hairstyles reminiscent of 1970's bands. The hobbits all have heads of tossled curls -- they're like members of Peter Frampton's group. Aragorn and Boromir have the long, unwashed bushes of Aerosmith, and the flaxen-maned Legolas has the fallen-angel look of one of the Allman Brothers. (The tubby, bilious and bearded Gimli could be a roadie for any of them.) ''Fellowship'' plays like a sword-and-sorcery epic produced by VH-1.

Mitchell doesn't apply this to the LOTR's bad guys, but orcs wouldn't have been out of place as back-up bands for Kiss or Alice Cooper.  Racial cues remain, though.  The "fighting Uruk-Hai," with their dreads, are a black rasta band, the elves are over-the-top Aryans, and the movies are replete with the old equations of white and light with goodness, black and dark with evil.

So one could imagine that if Trayvon Martin had wandered into Tolkien's Shire, some hobbit might justifiably mistake him for an "evil creature," follow and confront him, get in over his head, and escape by killing him.  That's Tolkien's social world, but in his moral universe, if we eliminate the connections between race and character, then this hobbit would be clearly be in the wrong (indeed, it's near impossible to imagine this scenario even unfolding in Hobbiton).

But Trayvon Martin died in Tolkien's social world rather than his moral universe.  Despite having evidence on hand of manslaughter, the Sanford police department didn't arrest Zimmerman until forced to do so.  People like Juror B37 can think George Zimmerman is guilty of nothing more than poor judgment, or that Trayvon is just as responsible for his own death, or that can dismiss the credibility of the prosecution's witness, Rachal Jeantel--a young black woman--because she didn't talk good American.

Does GoT move beyond Tolkien's racialized Middle Earth?  Hmm, sort of.  Accept for a one kingdom, the Starks of Winterfell, and maybe Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryon, everyone's pretty awful in GoT, no matter their color--though all the principle characters are white, as are most of the minor ones, except for Daenerys' growing multi-racial retinue of followers.  But the HBO series, like the books, gets around racialized characters by avoiding race-talk.  While there is plenty of derisive class and gender talk, this fantasy is grimly realistic in everything but race.  Interestingly, the nightmarish white walkers are, well, white, with blue eyes even.  But none of the trash-talking invokes racial differences--surprising for a story that pretends to be brutally frank.  Queen Cersei openly disses the poor and creeps like the Lord Walder Frey treat women as nothing more than something to screw and get pregnant.  But no racial aspersions.  Westeros is apparently post-racial.

Hardly.

As others have pointed out (e.g., Saladid Ahmed and Raffit Sani), what characters do people of color play in GoT?  Prostitutes, pirates, duplicitous merchants, or Dothroki savages.  And who saves all the dark-skinned slaves in HBO's season three?  The whitest of the white, Daenerys.  An old trope, and an old debate.  As if white people led the Birmingham boycott, resistance in South Africa to apartheid, indigenous resistance to Ladino oppression in Guatemala, among other examples (tons of criticism of stories To Kill a Mockingbird and Mississippi Burning on these grounds).

Does that mean GoT should be unwatchable?  No.  It should be occasion for what US Attorney General, Eric Holder, called for, and honest discussion about race, though he was reflecting on the George Zimmerman acquittal and not GoT.  As for GoT, had Trayvon Martin blundered into Westoros, he would have likely been one of the numerous casual casualties, though in his case, there would have been no tumultuous outcry about his death, or the legal wrangles around it.  Just another minor extra gone.  George Zimmerman the hapless knight who kills him only because he's armed with something more than concrete.

Only the powerful get to start conflict in the GoT universe, and get away with it--apparently in both Westoros and Sanford.