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Notes -
There are three problems:
Thematic: The explicit purpose of casting non-white actors was to "better represent" the modern world; so that people will think or feel in different ways about others (or those like themselves). This is nonsensical because including constant reminders of "the world today" is inherently contrary to immersing the audience in a fantasy setting. Nobody watches Middle-Earth to think about New York. Whatever case you might have for such casting decisions on *other *grounds, this specific angle made it artistically destructive. It's especially bizarre where the elves and dwarves are concerned, because neither of them are supposed to be human, yet they both have exact analogues for human racial variation.
Political: Tolkien was an English author who created Middle-Earth to substitute a lack of extant Anglo-Saxon mythology. Removing this for "inclusion reasons" not only denies the value of people developing specific histories or cultural works, but declares it an active problem, and posits that only universal stories are legitimate. It's especially tasteless because one of the strongest themes in Tolkien's writing is the tragedy of peoples' decline and disappearance -- the Ents are doomed to extinction, the Elves will leave the land, the Dwarves are a shadow of their former selves, and Numenor is entirely destroyed.
In-universe: Even if we ignore 1 and 2, ROP does not involve races in a way that makes sense in its type of setting. Humans live in kingdoms or villages, and the modern mass transportation that creates diverse cities today isn't the norm. Why so many unlike people live in the same place could be explained within the story, but it would make significant demands of the setting and plot. In LOTR, for example, Easternlings appear in Middle-Earth because they were recruited for the War of the Ring -- ROP has no such situation. It's taken for granted that this can happen because such situations are normal in (parts of) the modern (largely urban, Western) world, -- they're not normal in a world dominated by the horse and cart, and ROP was clearly more invested in thinking about the former than the latter.
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