The activist writing it was pretty thoroughly taken apart in the comments section. Over time since Gizmodo is a leftist shithole, the stars next to the comments could climb back into the writer’s favor, but for now, reasonable heads are prevailing.
It is a fact. If you see orc and think black person, YOU are the racist. The thought would never occur to a non-racist.
And If you are writing these types of things for clicks and money, then you are being paid to be racist.
Yea, this talk about "racial coded language" is all nonsense. Orcs are orcs, that's it. There's no hidden agenda.
Racial caricatures are obvious. That's the point. For example, the hypothetical fantasy novel written by AU!Hitler in
The Iron Dream has obvious racial caricatures.
The martian roaches in
Terra Formars are an obvious racial caricature. You can make a list of their traits and compare it to racist propaganda and stereotypes:
https://thekenpire.com/2015/03/17/terra-formars-is-an-obscenely-racist-manga-and-anime-series-but-its-sort-of-hilarious/With orcs, any resemblance to human racial caricatures is extremely tenuous at best. They're so genericized that you can't really trace them to any specific human ethnicity. Also, using orcs in your games has no correlation with racist attitudes.
https://areomagazine.com/2022/02/04/evil-orcs-accusations-of-racism-in-dungeons-and-dragons/Yes, many fictional races are based on stereotypes of real ethnic groups. Klingons are based on Russians, Yellow Peril (especially the 60s yellowface), and Vikings, Ferengi are based on caricatures of Jews (big noses, big ears, obsessed with money). But as times goes on the writers add tons of other baggage that makes them more than just allegories for real cultures, but their own thing. Of course, in
Star Trek they exist to impart moral lessons on to the audience about racism and cultural imperialism. The Klingons and Ferengi are people with rights to self-determination that should be respected.
Orcs are a gamist convention invented so that you can mow through hordes of mooks without worrying about whether they have families at home. (Writers screwed that up by introducing non-combatants later on, but my point stands.) If the presence of orcs made audiences more racist, then I would say that yes they're problematic. But they don't cause real world harm, so the criticism is moot.
How many points of similarity do orcs have with specific racial caricatures? Really, how many? They're ugly, savage, strong, stupid... okay, that narrows it to down to *checks notes* propaganda written by advanced cultures against lesser cultures (e.g. barbarians) or cultures being invaded against their invaders (e.g. steppe horsemen).
Meanwhile, here are the points of similarity between Dwarves and caricatures of Irish Jews: short, big noses, bearded, heavy drinkers, violent and rowdy, blunt, obsessed with wealth, persecuted minority (at least in
The Hobbit), proud ancient people with valuable cultural contributions... Huh, I'm beginning to see why I could only find one article criticizing dwarves as a racist caricature of Irish Jews.
https://alexraizman679957007.wordpress.com/2020/07/12/fantastic-diversity-the-fantasy-genres-unfortunate-implications/Sigh. The problem with all these casual accusations of racism is that they undercut the actual harm of racism and alienate people who might otherwise have been allies.