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It's a more widespread concern than it used to be, but it's not new. S MacPherson, letter in White Dwarf #73 (1986) (emphasis mine): It has often struck me that, being nearly all based on the well-worn cliches of pulp fiction, 'pulp drawing, and 'pulp cinema', role-playing games tend to...

In the D&D 4e Monster Manual (2008) "a monster's alignment is not rigid, and exceptions can exist to the general rule" (pg 7) so I'd say it rejects the idea of "always evil." Orcish behaviour in 4e may be due to environment and upbringing, as it is in Roger Moore's article in Dragon #62 (1982)...

The chart below is from Dungeons & Dragons Book I Men & Magic (1974). It shows that orcs (and some other monsters, such as ogres and minotaurs), could be either Chaotic or Neutral in the original game. Chaos in 1974 D&D was synonymous with evil. Post #280 from upthread covers the history of...

A similar myth developed about the 5000+ year old burial mounds built in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, Ohio River valley, and Mississippi River valley. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings (2003): The discovery of Indian burial mounds led to the idea that North America had once supported a...

You're right, I think, that H Rider Haggard is really important here. There's a throughline from the idea that Great Zimbabwe wasn't built by black people, its popularisation by Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines (1885), to the Lost World genre, particularly Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (and...

Grippli first appear in the AD&D 1e Monster Manual II (1983). The word "primitive" is not used in the entry. They defend themselves with snares, nets, poisoned darts and bolts, and occasionally a sword or dagger. A grippli lair is built on the ground and consists of mud and wood huts. The...

I should stress that I'm not saying all use of beings with both human and animal features in fiction is racist. The purpose of the quotations from Katie Hopkins et al. in post #245 upthread was to demonstrate that such usage can be racist. It's part of a counter-argument to the potential...

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION This post proposes a possible pathway whereby the ideas of scientific racists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard could have influenced the AD&D 1e orc and half-orc via very similar ideas expressed in 1949 in the letters pages of the...

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION This post is about the way race determines morality in AD&D 1e (1977-1979) and D&D 5e (2014), and the correspondence with scientific racism. Racial Determinism in D&D In the AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), morality seems to be determined...

To be fair, I did mention their article, Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons, upthread. It was an important announcement imo and caused a huge amount of debate on ENWorld at the time.

"Treasures are not won by care and forethought but by swift slaying and reckless attack." This is said by Yaris, one of the six Sea Lords who, with Elric's aid, attack the Melnibonéan capital, Imrryr, in Michael Moorcock's The Dreaming City in Science Fantasy #47 (1961). This novelette forms...

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION This post is about several different sorts of correspondences between "savage" humanoids in D&D 5e and racist ideas. Savage and Civilised Races Note the virtually identical terminology — D&D 5e's "civilized and savage" and "savage... races"...

D&D's closest analogue to that are probably the Drow, who owe a lot to Moorcock's Melniboneans, almost certainly intended by Moorcock as a metaphor for the British Empire. Ofc D&D takes that anti-imperialist message and turns it on its head by making its Melniboneans dark-skinned.

I should add that my argument in the post upthread isn't that all animal people are racist. It's that the use of animal features applied to real world people by racists demonstrates that animal people in fiction can be racist. (I'll add this to my OP as an edit.) Elsewhere in this thread I've...

I don't think it's ever been a matter of hate, exactly. At what level Gygax was aware when he gave evil humanoids non-European properties in 1e -- shamans and witch doctors, "mongrel" for half-orcs, etc -- I'm not sure. The AD&D 1e Monster Manual was written very quickly, under a lot of...

The charge of cannibalism, in some form, might be perennial -- it was levelled at early Christians, at Jews in medieval Europe, and against those believed to be witches in the early modern period. But the form it appears in in D&D -- Edgar Rice Burroughs-style pulp cannibalism (or...

CONTENT WARNING: GENOCIDAL RACISM, IN QUOTATION This post examines whether some of the D&D 5e "savage" humanoids — bugbears, gnolls, kobolds, lizardfolk, and orcs — cannot be considered racist because they are more like animals than people. In the D&D 5e Monster Manual (2014) artwork the...

JRR Tolkien, writing in 1959 or 1960, thought that orcs deserved mercy. JRR Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, Morgoth's Ring (1993) (emphasis mine): Though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they [orcs] must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in...

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION This post is about the correspondence between the alignment and mental abilities of the D&D "savage" humanoids and ideas about racial moral and intellectual inferiority. It uses the list on page 7 of the D&D 5e Monster Manual (2014) — bugbears...