I think it is very difficult, if not impossible, to construct a presentation of an inherently evil culture/people by drawing upon the tropes that were readily available to 19th and early 20th century writers - who were steeped in a certain way of presenting the non-European peoples that Europe was in the process of conquering/colonising - and then simply try and stipulate that no association is intended. The work itself manifests a certain conception of what it is to be "savage", a "brute", and "inherently evil"; and it's hardly a subtle conception.
You're making a leap here, which I think is common and part of what has generated "Orcgate." You are saying that the creators of D&D drew upon the tropes of racism. This isn't really or necessarily correct, as far as I understand it. Rather, the 19th-20th century writers and the creators and designers of D&D
drew from the same archetype, that of the "brutish, evil twisted person." It is a mythic archetype, and goes hundreds, even thousands, of years before the 19th century.
Meaning, an orc is a modern fantasy version of a mythic archetype. It isn't that the creators of D&D said, "the orc is a stand-in for the non-white other," it is that those earlier racist writers said "non-white people are orcs."
This is a subtle, but crucial difference that I think is at the heart of "Orcgate."
I'm sure that not all of those sci-fi films and TV shows in which the majority of people of the ship crew or "the Federation" or the far-flung worlds of the galaxy are white are trying to present a conception of a white supremacist utopia. That doesn't mean that they can't be called to account for presenting a certain conception of what it is to a human of the future.
If the author/creator didn't intend the connotations of the work - if it didn't occur to him/her that presenting all humans as white; or presenting people whose cultures are predominantly non-urban and who are hostile to frontier colonisers as "inherently evil"; was a perpetuation of racist tropes - well that's the author's or creator's problem for not thinking stuff through. It doesn't mean they suddenly get to disown the meanings of their work.
You will not find any disagreement from me that more diverse representation in TV and film is a good thing, although it also depends upon the premise and context of the show. If it is a story based on Northern European mythology like
Lord of the Rings, it makes sense to remain true to the artist's vision. That's what Peter Jackson pretty much said, that he wasn't interested in injecting his own political view into the LotR films but trying to re-create Tolkien's own vision. So rather than "diversify LotR," I would suggest leaving it as an expression from a specific cultural milieu and author and instead create new expressions that draw from other cultures. What about an African epic? Or a Mesoamerican one? Etc. There is a world of mythology out there.
So yes, a Federation
should be very diverse - it is derived from a future global culture, one that has largely moved beyond issues like racism and xenophobia, at least within humanity. But mythic proto-Europe, ala Middle-earth? It makes sense that all or most of the actors are from European descent.
As for "connotations," see my comment above. A D&D orc is drawn from a mythic archetype, which racist writers also drew from in their depiction of non-white people. That does not connect the orc to the racist depiction, it just means that they are both expressions of the same mythic archetype. The "connotation" is making an erroneous "lateral" leap, rather than recognizing the actual causal relation. An orc is an expression of a mythic archetype, not a racial stereotype.
And really I think these points are pretty basic. Why are we still debating them?
Because these basic points are coming from a specific hermeneutic angle and disregarding any other. It is an interpretation of the phenomena, not the phenomena itself. Whether or not this perspective is useful and has validity (I think it does, to a point) doesn't diminish the benefit of considering other perspectives. In truth, without considering other hermeneutics, we run the risk of a kind of mono-perspectival dogmatism, as if there is "one true way" to interpret everything.
So the points you make, and others have made,
are pretty basic...from within a specific interpretative framework. By why not expand it and consider other perspectives? No hermeneutic is absolute, but I would suggest that we take a more dialectic approach, rather than the endless head-butting of one mono-perspective vs. the other.