"THERE ARE NO BLACK PEOPLE IN RIVENDELL, IT'S UNREALISTIC"
To be honest, I absolutely would expect the cast to be way more diverse if the movies were shot today. It's shocking how white those movies are- I'm pretty sure the haradrim are the only on-screen POC in the entire trilogy. The Hobbit movies tried to correct for this by having POC extras in the crowd scenes in Laketown, and some of them may have even had a few lines. Still no actual characters though
It's kinda funny that the terrible Dungeons and Dragons movie with Jeremy Irons that came out a year before Fellowship had an elf portrayed by a black actor as one of the main characters
Honestly, it is predictable that the fash would stand up for the worst aspect of Tolkien's work. I have friends that were really turned off of Tolkien because of how, due to his own racism and Germanic literature tropes, all of the "good guys" were described as pale or fair skinned in the books, and the only POC were humans siding with Sauron.
In my personal opinion, those folks need to lighten up. We’re talking about a completely fictional realm where there is plenty of fantasy diversity expressed in other ways, written by a British man who was born in 1892. Enjoy it or don’t, but there really isn’t much foundation to assume that Tolkien was trying to be racist with his literary choices.
From the Wikipedia article on Tolkien and race:
Sure, we can throw in some black characters in new productions of his work, but judging the man by modern standards is just looking for outrage.