Tolkien’s orcs are dark-skinned and “slant-eyed”.
"His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red."
"There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands."
"A grim dark band, four score at least of large, swart, slant-eyed Orcs."
“Swart” is an archaic term for swarthy, meaning dark-skinned.
They are organised in tribes.
"Apparently the members of two or three quite different tribes were present, and they could not understand one another’s orc-speech."
"And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes."
Almost all beings described as swart or swarthy in The Lord of the Rings are evil, with one exception – the men of Lossarnach and Lebennin, which is part of Gondor. All tribal beings are evil.
Orcs in 1e AD&D are “brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen”, live in tribes, and have witch doctors. “Witch doctors are tribal cleric/magic-users.” Orcs are of lawful evil alignment and have intelligence of “average (low)”. “Orcs are cruel and hate living things in general... They take slaves for work, food, and entertainment (torture, etc.)” Half-orcs are described as “mongrels”, and it should be noted that this word isn’t used for half-elves. “Half-orcs tend to favor the orcish strain heavily.”
The term “witch doctor” was first used as an alternative for cunning man – a European folk healer and magician. However its coupling with the word “tribal” suggests that it instead refers to African witch doctors, a staple of colonial adventure fiction such as King Solomon’s Mines and Tarzan.
“Mongrel” is a pejorative term for someone who is biracial.
"It is scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over. Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which is stimulated and at times overexcited by flashes of brilliancy from the other." - Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916)
"There must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng… all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type." - HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928)
Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden (1899) describes Filipinos as “Half-devil and half-child.” This seems an apt description of orcs, given they are both evil and of low intelligence.
The following four quotes are all from Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide (2007).
'Men of “position” declared “that the blackfellow was not a human being and that there was no more guilt in shooting him than in shooting a native dog”.' This is in the context of the Bathurst War in Australia, 1824.
'A juror called blacks “a set of monkies and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better”.' Myall Creek Massacre, 1838.
'Defending the Black Hills in 1876, Lakota warriors killed Custer and 225 of his soldiers at the Little Big Horn. The San Francisco Chronicle now urged “no treating or temporizing with the red brutes,” whose “fiendish atrocities” made them “worse than wild beasts.”'
'Conservative Party spokesmen… described the Herero as “blood-thirsty beasts in the form of humans”.' German Southwest Africa, 1907.
There are parallels with orcs here, both in their nature and in the way they are treated by PCs (and are expected to be treated.)
