No Black Elves!
Behold The Day of the Big Black Elf (Is that an oxymoron? Kinda like jumbo shrimp?)
Issue #135 OpEd September 12, 2022
I never thought the day would come when racism made me laugh my ass off, but that day has come.
So here’s where I’m going with this so as not to lose you before I get to the punch line; you may have read something about the outrage in the darker corners of fantasy fandom where rabid originalist white fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Game of Thrones are screeching, yipping, and hollering their offended little heads off because diversity has landed in the one corner of existence outside of Idaho where they felt secure in the comforting belief that surely, surely, Black and brown folk would never significantly darken the purity of the realm.
But then Black elves started showing up in Middle Earth, and they were throwin’ gang signs and crankin’ up their rap music so loud that all the other elves and even the “orks” felt compelled to protest loudly and demand that the Black elves depart Middle Earth and return to ‘Hood Earth from whence they came.
“Make Middle Earth Great Again!” was their rallying cry.
OK. So not really. Because, well, it’s all made up. It’s fantasy, dude.
Here’s what’s really going on.
It was bad enough when Venus and Serena landed on the tennis courts, but then Tiger had to land on the golf course. Black hockey players. Black NASCAR drivers. Black swimmers in the Olympics. Hell, Oprah went and got herself her OWN damned television network. WTF?
And let’s not talk about The King of Pop, The Queen of Soul, Prince, Whitney, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughn, Big Mama Thornton, Sammy Davis, Jr., Nat King Cole, the entire genre of rap and hip hop, techno, and the pitifully sad landscape of what music would look like without us.
And then, of course, there was that Black POTUS who didn’t just win one but two terms in office, both of them decisively.
So that did it. Enough is enough, they said. It’s time we showed the world that white is still relevant. You’re about to see what white power can do when it gets really, really pissed off.
Stand back.
Trump 2016.
After which the hounds of hell were unleashed and all mirrors were shattered. The dead didn’t know they were buried and the ugly, deformed, and twisted could convince themselves they were gorgeous in the eyes of their new Orange Lord.
Turns out the demonic dominion wasn’t that far away after all. The portal was a tower in Manhattan.
And this, kids, is the infected air that we breathe today. Want to know what the fear and desperation of a dying empire smells like? It smells like this.