There is the Talislanta RPG, where all the human groups are archetypes with different values. It plays great. Of course those are fictional groups nothing to do with us, no Asian types, no medieval setting etc.
Yeah I know what Wikipedia says about Howard. The problem is, nowadays (and even decades ago) you can be called racist (or sexist, or any other negative ism, really) for any number of things/views. I remember my niece and her mother being called racist and sexist once for dressing the girl up as a hula dancer, complete with black make up. So to me, to claim anyone was/is racist other than in a cultural context like the times Howard lived in without real proof (as in comments making it very clear you hate/disapprove of this or that skin color or eye shape) comes over more like a justification to point attention away from one self. Not that that is the case here but I have seen it too often.
Maybe it is different in the US, but in my experience, what comes over as racism or just prejudice is more often than not a simple egocentric view of the offending person.
You can make an experiment with children regarding egocentric perception. Take a story not mentioning the color of skin or hair of the protagonist and then ask the child you read to or who has read the story how they think the hero looked like. If you have a child who grew up in a predominantly one race setting, they will almost always describe the hero as being from their race. Even if you have kids from a mixed cultural setting (as in London where I made this experiment) you will get an almost 100% overlap with the race of the reader/listener in the descriptions.
Could it be that most artists for RPGs are, in fact, white, and thus unconsciously prefer to draw white characters, or are just better at it? Maybe then we need more black ARTISTS in the business and it will fix itself.
