Just here to declare my support for the casting of 'Black' and other non-'white' actors as Elves in Rings of Power!
Just because Tolkien represented diversity with Men, Elves, Dwarves and hobbits does not mean he did not support diversity!
And the only time Tolkien ever came even close to emphasizing race among humans based on skin color was to show that it was the Dark Lord's fault that the different groups of humans were at odds! To tell us that the problems between the races in our world are caused by the lies of the Devil!
I'm thinking about specifically when Aragorn and the others pardon the Dunlendings after the defeat of Saruman, and the Dunlendings are surprised and tell us that they were led to believe that people like Aragorn killed and ate people like them for food! Obviously the lies of the Dark Lord- and Tolkien was showing us that the problems between human races today are also caused by the lies of the Devil! And that was literally the only time the issue was ever brought up in all Tolkien!
Otherwise people are not categorized by skin color or even geographic place of origin in Tolkien! And Tolkien rarely describes skin color at all!
But Tolkien represented ideas of diversity extensively with men and hobbits, dwarves and elves!
The only reason the Orcs are bad is that they are controlled by the Dark Lord! They are not bad by themselves! The same is true of all the dark races- they are only bad because they are controlled by the Dark Lord! Before they were in the power of the Dark Lord, the Orcs were Elves! And the Trolls were Ents! And after the Ring was destroyed (and the Dark Lord's power with it), the Orcs no longer were even capable of thinking well, and ran about like ants whose nest has been drowned! All their evil was because they were controlled by the Dark Lord!
The Orcs are not an independent race in Tolkien- they're basically Elvish prisoners of war whose ancestors have been prisoners of the Dark Lord for thousands of years (and I love the lord of the Rings movies, but the Orcs should not look as different from elves as they do in the movie!) All the independent races are shown as being fundamentally good, even lowly humans!
In fact, the independent races that are different from us in Tolkien are shown to be far superior to us- the people who are different are celebrated!
They just aren't categorized by skin color! Why should skin color be that important? Tolkien usually does not even describe skin color, it is not important to him!
And the humans who are enlightened and advanced are those humans who have learned from those other, older races! They are not different by skin color, they are only different because they have had more of a chance to learn from Elves and Dwarves!
The Elves and Dwarves in the west are more advanced compared to the other Elves and Dwarves because they have had a chance to learn from the angels, the Valar and Maiar, who live across the sea to the west!
A lot like the lands in our own world that are more advanced, lands like India and Persia, are the lands that have had more of a chance to learn from the sages of the Age of Sages- Isaiah, Confucius, Plato, The Buddha, many others in India and China, while our own backward west is so far from Jerusalem and Athens where the nearest sages of Confucius's day were. (It is the west that is backwards, and the east that was advanced! But Tolkien was familiar with the teachings of Jesus and Plato, and understood them as few have in the west!)
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. I will add one more thing. Sexuality, hetero- or homo-, is not a major theme in Tolkien. Though he recognizes falling in love as a natural part of life, this is not a major theme in his works. Tolkien's works are mainly nonsexual. How many characters in Lord of the Rings would act and look exactly the same if they were gay? How do we know that Gandalf or Pippin is not gay? And why would Tolkien, who vehemently opposed a strict, harsh version of Christianity, and much preferred folksy kindness to harsh strictness, be opposed to gays and lesbians? Or anyone that was not unkind? Tolkien is on your side! Tolkien wants us to be kind to everyone!