But doesn't this have more to do with Howard living in a time when racialist ideas had a lot of traction than with story structure? He uses racialist descriptions all in a number his stories (I am going by memory, so it isn't like I have a list of examples next to me, but one that sticks out was his him talking about a character's semitic features (something about the way it was done) for example and at times him talking about peoples that was noticeably racialist). I think had he not been steeped in an intellectual world where racialist explanations were the norm, those descriptions would have been a lot different. I get that there is an argument to be made for the picts occupying the same space as native americans and Howard possibly using the american frontier and stories about it as foundation....but I am not seeing how that means the structure itself is the problem. I can have a game with orcs filling in that role. And I can imagine a world where those orcs aren't littered with racist stereotypes, and I can also imagine a world where they are (I can also imagine a world where those orcs have real world cultural features and whether those are negative, racist, bad or good depictions are debated).
Racialist thinking itself is definitely something we call agree is bad. I think where I would disagree with people is the direct line they draw from orcs are evil to racialist theories about human groups.