I would be self conscious with that passage regardless of who I am reading it to but particularly if the person was Asian. Of course I would pause at such a passage and wouldn't be callous about the topic. Like I said I not defending the use of the slur. And that slur is one I find particularly troubling.
So, then, who do you think yoiu are disagreeing with in this thread with respect to this particular issue - that is, the way that JRRT presents orcs in LotR?
I am talking about <snippage> what the tropes mean today, and if a concept like Evil Orc is something that is a problem (or related to colonialism).
These are three different things.
The trope of a "slant-eyed, sallow face therefore half-goblin" I think means the same today as it did when JRRT wrote it.
Whether the FRPG notiont of an orc is related to "colonialist propaganda", ie the sort of racist ideas that are presented as legitimising the colonialist endeavour, is a different thing. I think the origin is fairly clear. I think it remains pretty clear in Gygax's Monster Manual. Frankly I think it remains pretty clear in the 4e Monster Manual. I don't have a copy of the 5e one, so can't comment on that.
Is this fact about the orc trope a
problem? As I've said already upthread, I don't know. It may not be possible to give a general answer to that question.
I don't know that he had asians in mind (particularly since he is talking, if I follow, about another hobbit).
JRRT is not talking about a hobbit. He is talking about a southerner (a "man" in JRRT's vocabulary) who is hagning out with another "man" (Bill Ferny, a petty bad guy). And to be frank it is crystal clear what and who he had in mind, given his presentations of Easterlings and Southrons.
what Tolkien intended
<snip>
I feel the nuance of what I am saying is getting lost here. He was writing in a very different time, and you do have to put that into the conversation.
<snip>
I do think there is huge difference between the way things like race appear in LoTR and the way it appears in other works (like the works of Lovecraft). With Tolkien, I don't get the sense that any of it is ill-mentioned or even deliberate. And I think that matters. I don't think Tolkien was a racist.
I've not read very much Tolkien biography. (Only what one picks up in some of the critical work on LotR.) It seems unlikely - for statistical if no other reasons - that he was not virulently racist like HPL. For the same (statistical) reasons it seems likely that he was racist, in the sense of viewing non-white people as tending to be inferior in character and accomplishment to Europeans. This was, after all, a fairy common viewpoint among English people, including educated English people, of his time. They lived as part of, and from time to time took significant steps to defend, an Empire that was based very heavily on racist ideas and was governed very extensively along racial lines.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, that JRRT was devoid of any racist judgement, and happened to include a passage equating Central/East Asian appearance with goblinness just out of habit or carelessness or received literary style -
that wouldn't change anything about the passage.