Kiliel: Interracial and Queer

Trigger warnings: mentions of assault, rape, and murder.

Those who know me know that Tauriel/Kili is my favorite romantic relationship, and this essay is about two aspects of it that are commonly overlooked.

Tolkien is known for his interracial relationships, and Middle-earth's history is fundamentally shaped by them. Many people have talked about how Tolkien explicitly and consistently condemns internal racism throughout the legendarium. The Fellowship is the most well known example, but there are many different examples of how great things always happen when the different races come together. Haldir summarizes it perfectly when he says, “Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.”

Alternatively, many haters say that Tauriel/Kili invalidates the importance Legolas and Gimli's friendship because now Legolas and Gimli were not the first elf and dwarf to get along.

This is completely nonsensical. Legolas and Gimli's friendship was never the first. Elves and dwarrow have a long history together that began before the First Age (see here for a complete covering of that history).

This also ignores the fact that Legolas and Gimli's friendship only starts after Gimli's relationship with Galadriel; and that that relationship is part of an often overlooked yet fundamental part of Tolkien's legendarium – the majority of Tolkien's romantic relationships are also interracial, and most of them are explicitly stated to be divine order. All of them follow a distinct pattern.

The majority of these relationships are female elves and male humans: Lúthien/Beren, Idril/Tuor, Nimloth/Dior (Dior was mortal, contrary to popular opinion), Finduilas/Túrin, Mithrellas/Imrazôr, Arwen/Aragorn

We also have a female maia and a male elf: Melian/Thingol

And platonically, a female elf and a male dwarf: Galadriel and Gimli

There is only one case of a male elf and a female human: Aegnor/Andreth. Unlike the other relationships, this one is hidden away in an obscure text and has no effect on the overall plot of Middle-earth.

Because of all of this, many fans have wondered why it's always the female who loves down and has to suffer the consequences. For some reason many even believe it's because of sexism. What those fans miss is that it's a clear metaphor to the history of racism and interracial relationships between white women and black men:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia case that struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Fifty years later, it seems absurd to most of us that such laws ever existed in the first place. But, as historian Jessica Viñas-Nelson explains, the fear of interracial marriage has been at the center of America's racial anxiety for a very long time. 

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After multiple appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion for the unanimous court declared marriage to be “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’…To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications…is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty.” Warren further ruled that interracial marriage bans were designed expressly “to maintain White Supremacy.” The court’s decision not only struck down an 80-year precedent set in the case Pace v. Alabama (1883), but 300 years of legal code. 

In the decades that followed, the nation’s views on interracial marriage have undergone a slow sea change. In 1967, only 3 percent of newlyweds were interracial couples. Today, 17 percent of newlyweds and 10 percent of all married couples differ from one another in race or ethnicity. Even though legal in most states by 1959, the overwhelming majority of white Americans then believed rejecting interracial marriage to be fundamental to the nation’s well-being. In 2017, in contrast, 91 percent of Americans believe interracial marriage to be a good or at least benign thing. 

Today, few would publicly admit to opposing interracial marriage. In fact, most Americans now claim to celebrate the precepts behind Loving and the case has become an icon of equality and of prejudice transcended. Accordingly, individuals across the political spectrum, from gay rights activists to opponents of Affirmative Action who call for colorblindness, cite it to support their political agendas. 

Yet, for 300 years, interracial marriage bans defined racial boundaries and served as justification for America’s apartheid system. And 50 years on, many of their effects remain. 

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In 1664, Maryland sought to stanch potential interracial marriages by threatening enslavement for white women who married black men. Two years earlier, Virginia had enacted legislation to profit from white men’s sexual relationships with black women. Children would inherit the social status of their mother, not their father, meaning the children of slave women would be born slaves regardless of the father’s status. Virginia then outlawed interracial marriage entirely in 1691. Virginia’s original penalty for those who wed interracially—banishment—was the same punishment the Lovings received nearly three centuries later. 

These laws had clear aims: to control women’s sexuality, to establish categories of slave and free, and to develop racist ideologies justifying discrimination. White men had sexual access to all women and exclusive access to white women. Interracial sex, so long as it remained out-of-wedlock and occurred between white men and black women, merited little legal or social consequence. These laws also set into motion America’s peculiar system of racial classification: hypodescent. Americans would be classified not according to the degree of mixture they contained but by the total absence or presence of blackness. 

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Interracial marriage bans, therefore, arose to build racial barriers that would supplant alliances among the laborers by creating binary categories of black and white, slave and free. Indeed, Maryland’s assembly passed the statute discouraging marriage between white women and black men within an act authorizing lifelong slavery. 

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Most white northerners showed themselves firmly opposed to any suggestion of black equality through their rejection of interracial marriage or even the mere hint of its occurrence. Not coincidently, public hysteria against interracial marriage grew louder in the 1830s when the rights of black people were being contentiously debated and a more vocal and inclusive abolitionist movement emerged. Defenders of slavery accused abolitionists of coveting interracial marriages, despite the undeniable evidence of interracial offspring on Southern plantations resulting from slave owners forcing themselves on slave women. 

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As the targeted violence against abolitionists and black institutions illustrates, by the 1830s, interracial marriage had become a proxy for white anxieties that the social order they had built upon racial distinction might be endangered. Abolition threatened the social order and thus supporters of slavery raised fears of interracial marriage to torpedo abolitionists’ efforts and to hurt the free black population. 

Many of the 165 anti-abolitionist riots that took place in the 1830s were provoked by rumors of interracial marriages. Little else could more effectively raise a mob or garner as much wrath; anti-abolitionists used this to great effect. In 1838, the black-authored newspaper Colored American astutely labeled the tactic “the battering ram of the pro-slavery party.” 

Despite allegations that abolitionists were amalgamationists (supporters of interracial marriage), most in fact opposed interracial marriage and readily crumbled before the oft-repeated question: “Would you let your daughter marry a Negro?” 

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For the enslaved population, however, no such consensual interracial relationship could exist. Even the rare and seemingly loving unions that functioned like marriages between masters and slaves could not—by definition—be consensual. Most interracial sex under slavery, however, did not even have a veneer of loving attachments and was instead the blatant rape of black women by white men. This history’s effect on African Americans’ views of interracial relationships cannot be overstated. 

Nor can interracial marriage’s role in politics and legal history be exaggerated. 

As part of the justification for the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney used the existence of interracial marriage bans as evidence that the Founding Fathers never intended Black Americans to be citizens. These laws, Taney insisted, were evidence of a “perpetual and impassable barrier erected between the white race and [those]…which they looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings that intermarriages between white persons and negroes and mulattoes were regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as crimes.” 

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The far more chilling effect of irrational white fears over miscegenation, however, emerged outside of the court system: lynching. 

Between 1882 and 1968, at least 3,446 black men were publicly and ritualistically murdered by white mobs. Roughly a third were accused of raping white women, but the alleged need to protect white women from black men—universally portrayed as violent, lustful, and savage—justified lynch mobs’ actions to the larger white public. Black journalist Ida B. Wells demonstrated that many of these accusations of rape stemmed from consensual interracial relationships that had been discovered by white women’s disapproving relatives. Nevertheless, the lynching continued, as did white fears about racial “purity.” 

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Despite the white South’s intransigence, just months after the Loving decision, two other events cemented 1967 as a momentous year for interracial marriage and for shaping the public’s views on it. In September 1967, Peggy Rusk—the white daughter of Secretary of State Dean Rusk—and Guy Smith—a black Georgetown graduate student—married. In a move unthinkable a few years earlier, Time ran a photo of the newlyweds on its cover and celebrated their union as “a marriage of enlightenment.” 

Just a few months after that, a comedy-drama hit theaters staring three of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner centers on a white woman bringing her black fiancé home to meet her parents. Her liberal parents’ ideals are tested, but ultimately conclude that the pair are “two wonderful people… who happened to fall in love” and give the union their blessing. As the year’s most talked-about film and one of the first respectful onscreen portrayals of an interracial couple—even if the film made Sidney Poitier’s character too perfect and whitewashed white racism—it did much to nudge public opinion towards acceptance. (source)

And:

One chief among the trespasses (occasionally real, but usually imagined) was any claim of sexual contact between black men and white women. The trope of the hypersexual and lascivious black male, especially vis-a-vis the inviolable chastity of white women, was and remains one of the most durable tropes of white supremacy. 

According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), nearly 25% of lynching victims were accused of sexual assault. Nearly 30% were accused of murder. 

“The mob wanted the lynching to carry a significance that transcended the specific act of punishment,” wrote the historian Howard Smead in Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker. The mob “turned the act into a symbolic rite in which the black victim became the representative of his race and, as such, was being disciplined for more than a single crime … The deadly act was [a] warning [to] the black population not to challenge the supremacy of the white race.” (source)

And:

An example of these laws in action occurred on March 22, 1901, when a white woman and a black man were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, and accused of walking and talking together on Whitehall Street. In a news article entitled, “Color Line Was Ignored,” The Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported that Mrs. James Charles, “a handsomely dressed white woman of prepossessing appearance,” and C.W. King, “a Negro cook,” were arrested after Officer J.T. Shepard reported having seen the two talk to each other and then “walk side by side for several minutes.” 

Mrs. Charles gave a statement after her arrest, not challenging the law itself, but fervently denying the accusation. She insisted she had exchanged no words with Mr. King, and merely smiled as she passed him dancing on the street: 

"As I paused to listen to the music I noticed a negro man, the one arrested with me, dancing on the sidewalk. I smiled at his antics and was about to pass on when a policeman touched me on the arm and said he wanted to talk to me. I stopped and he asked why I talked to a negro. I denied having spoken to any negro. I told him I was a southern born woman, and his insinuations were an insult." 

Mr. King also denied having spoken to Mrs. Charles; he said he never knew there was a white woman near him. 

No further reporting on the arrests was published, and it is not clear whether they were convicted and fined when tried the next afternoon. (source)

The fact is this incredible metaphor underpins all of Middle-earth's history, and the filmmakers were not at all stepping away from Tolkien when they created Tauriel/Kili. The LotR films have Arwen/Aragorn; and since The Silmarillion has never been filmed, Tauriel/Kili is crucial for giving important context about this theme and Arwen/Aragorn.

Like Thingol, Beren, and Aragorn; Kili is rendered dumbstruck by Tauriel when they first meet. Like Lúthien, Tauriel saves Kili's life over and over. Both Arwen and Tauriel show and hold to a fundamental moral message that comes straight from Tolkien and shapes their films.

The other overlooked aspect that I love about them is the fact they are both queer. How you ask?

Kili is queer because he is naturally intuitive, open-minded, ponders the nature of nature, isn’t emotionally invested in fighting, has the bow as one of his main weapons, and isn't attracted to dwarven beauty standards. All of this is the polar opposite of dwarven culture (see here), and we see him be punished for his culturally unacceptable behavior by his fellow dwarrow. His aesthetics are also more feminine than the other upper class dwarrow (his sword even has little hearts on it). However, while Kili's aesthetics are more feminine than the other dwarrow, he does not fit the traditional femininity as shown by the elves; thus making his aesthetics queer as well.

Tauriel is queer because of her aesthetics (see here). She has the edgiest designs out of all the elves and is the only elven character to wear full corsets. While Tauriel has the edgiest designs and is thus the most masculine elf, she still has a lot of femininity and does not fit traditional or toxic masculinity (which is shown by the dwarven race).

A queer and interracial couple where the male is the more feminine one and the female is the more masculine one? I'm not surprised that they get as much hate as they do – everything about them is incredibly progressive and perfect. They truly are a phenomenal addition to Tolkien's already wonderful and progressive legendarium.