Mooretoons

This week Elon Musk lent his billion dollar voice to the chorus of critics offended by the sight of Black faces on Amazon Prime’s “Rings of Power” series. For some reason they think JRR Tolkien wouldn’t have tolerated a variety of skin colors or powerful women among his fantasy races. He’d be “rolling in his grave,” Musk said. Maybe so, but so what? Tolkien’s estate oversaw production of the series, so what the author thoughts would be don’t matter — nor should they. Every era reinterprets its old stories in new ways to suit contemporary sensibilities and make new meanings. That’s what makes living art, and keeps it alive for future generations to play with.

The AV Club suggests Elon might be also acting out of rivalry with another space mongering billionaire, Jeff Bezos. Bezos himself took to Twitter to go after Uju Anya, a Black woman who expressed disdain for the recently departed Queen of England, criticizing the queen for overseeing British oppression and genocide in Anya’s native Nigeria. Twitter deleted her tweet and Carnegie Melon University, her employer, publicly criticized her as well. If you want a good example of white fragility empowered by wealth and cultural institutions, there it is: Two billionaires worked up over the sight of Black people disrupting their precious colonialist spaces.