JM hints at it but effectively all the comments from "Orcs are irredeemibly Evil", to "Orcs are inferior and brutish", to "it's our moral obligation to eliminate them before they can harm 'real people' ", to "there are no shades of grey there is good and there is evil and this entire race are evil" .... all of them sound just like racist/creedist polemic used by everyone from the Nazis to the KKK to Al-Qaeda.
I don't think I'm hinting. I've said outright that the attributes given to monsters like orcs and the statements made about them have clear parallels to the statements made by racists (using the term in the broadest sense, which includes ethnic and sectarian hatred) against the groups they hate, because the purpose is the same. The purpose is to depict the group as monstrous and worthy of hatred if not destruction. And racists lie, even outrageously so, in order to apply such monstrous traits to all members of the group that they hate in order to make a persuasive reason to fear, hate, or even want to eliminate a group.
But I think the problem with the parallel is not that it's wrong to identify evil for what it is or to hate or want to destroy evil but that the groups they hate are not evil, which is why they invariably lie when making their case for hatred. Why did people make up stories about Jews using the blood of Christian children for Passover wine? Because the reality wouldn't have persuaded people to want to hate and kill them, so they enhanced the argument with lies to make them seem more monstrous.
If anything this thread has some to reinforce my beleive that there is inherent racism in the treatment of gobinoids in D&D. Even the occassional half-orc that manages to overcome his racial origins and rise up to live with humans is a reinforcement of the fact that the other can only be controlled and contained by civilisation.
Of course it's racist! The first definition of racism from Merriam-Webster is:
"
[A] belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."
If you remove the "human" for a fantasy game where "race" actually means "species", it's pretty clear that defining certain species as inherently monstrous is, by definition, "racist". But I don't think that the wrong question to be asking. The question is whether such racism is justified in a fantasy setting in a way that it is not in the real world.
To put this another way, suppose that Swedes really were inherently violent and murderous and having one living in your neighborhood was akin to having a tiger living free in your neighborhood and that it would only be a matter of time before people would start turning up dead. Would it be wrong to not want to have a Swede as a next door neighbor? Would it be wrong to want to run them out of town? Would it be wrong to want to kill them if they won't go peacefully before they start killing your family? And if this thought exercise makes you uncomfortable, why is that?
What makes racism indefensible and bad is not that it's mean or hateful but that it's simply not based on the truth. The fact that racists regularly have to lie in order to sow their hatred illustrates how false and irrational their position is. And if you want to argue that's not why racism is bad, then I'd be curious why you do think it is bad because you'd essentially be arguing that speaking the truth is bad.
Now, you could ask why anyone would want to create an environment where racism is justified. Isn't that an awful lot like what RaHoWa does? And I think that misses the point of why monsters are included in the game. The point is not to create justified racism but to populate the setting with monsters. For most people, such monsters are included for the same reason they include demons, zombies, and killer robots in their games, which is to provide a clear enemy to fight and defeat because people often want their escapist fiction to be more simple than reality, with clear-cut bad guys. And for such people, wanting to kill an orc because it's a monster is no more a desire to wallow in justifiable racism than wanting to kill zombies is.