This is a very interesting discussion.. Good thing he-who-shall-not-be-named is too busy to intervene. I don't see this thread devolving into flame war, as he fears.
Random observations:
Pointing out that there is evidence that the celts practiced sacrificial cannibalism. You can avoid a lot of issues if all your cannibals aren't BIPOC.
Gary did just this with World of Greyhawk, with the Suel cannibals in the Amedio Jungle and Hepmonaland.
Make no mistake about the "no evil races" folks: they do not like classic D&D and would like to see its destruction.
That seems just as misguided as the people who declare that Gary was a fascist imperialist because of orcs. Sure, there may be some nasty people like you describe but there are also plenty of well meaning people that who are attempting to make the game more available for everyone.
That's pretty different from any description of any anatomically modern human, so I don't think we get to blame Gygax for the "orcs = BIPOC" trope. Nor Tolkien. I think it's just Warcraft.
Agreed. WoW did ruin everything, didn't it? The idea of equating race with real world culture seemed like a good idea at the time, but then it's lead to this.
I'd say that humanoids in 1e are more like the vikings. Raiding, pillaging, amoral scumbags you must deal with carefully. The anthropophagy is there to accentuate the alienness, and also probably a throwback to the fairy tale origins of many of these races.
D&D orcs are swarthy (black or "brownish green " i.e. olive skinned) subhumans with overactive libidos who rape our women. Tolkein orcs were slant-eyed, flat nosed and yellow skinned. You really don't see how people connected those to existing racial tropes?
To me that seems like too much of a stretch. It's assuming too much about the intentions of said authors.
It'd be like saying that Tolkien is homophobic because he has the good transformed wizard (Gandalf the White) opposing the evil transformed wizard Saruman, Saruman of the many colors (=rainbow, like the rainbow flag). That would be assuming too much about Tolkien (and also be historically wrong, as the rainbow flag didn't become a symbol until the late 1970s, after Tolkien had passed away).
Sure they might've subconsciously picked up some racism and pulled that into their descriptions of the evil humanoid races, but I think at best that was unintentional.
Hobgoblins were slant-eyed in AD&D, and still generally wear fucking asian or faux-asian armor.
I took that to be that they were similar to the Ogre Magi. They have origins in the 'distant east'. Ogre Magi, at the very least, were a way to bring Oni into the faux European D&D setting. I wouldn't presume this to mean Gary is racist. I do also think it is entirely possible that he's unconsciously grabbing from early 20th century mass media. Who knows? <shrug>
I'm glad you guys brought up Star Wars. George Lucas has said the Ewok/Imperial battle on the moon of Endor was supposed to be a reference to the Vietnam War. And yet you get the Neimodians in the Phantom Menace, who seem obviously inspired by the Japanese of the old serials. I doubt he meant them to be racist like that, but that's what he grew up with and he did it without thinking.
(Also I finally rewatched the Attack of the Clones for the second time recently. Ugh. That movie gave me a headache. I ended up hating EVERYONE, Obi Wan, Anakin, everyone, by the end of the movie. George isn't good at writing dialogue, and all of their personalities were grating).
Unfortunately the noble intent to erase some of these old racist throwbacks has lead to a sort of new McCarthyism. The easy, obvious racists have been (or had been) routed, so now the anti-racist are looking for even more subtle forms of it. These kind of things don't turn out well. People should chill out.
The Heretic