ENWorld thread,
Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda? from March 2019. For most of the past year, any thread on the topic got locked. That might be one reason it seemed fine.
These two books cover the subject:
Roger Echo-Hawk, Tolkien in Pawneeland (1st ed 2013)
Helen Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature (2018)
The 3e Living Greyhawk module The Only Good Orc... (2005) references the phrase "the only good injun is a dead injun" attributed to 19th century US general Philip Sheridan. The module features an orcish paladin of St Cuthbert, the "good orc" of the title.
Some further examples of the discussion -
Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien Race and Cultural History (2010)
Blog post
Tolkien's Racial Theories from 2009 comes at the issue in the context of rpg-ing.
Anderson Rearick,
Why is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc (2004)
Rearick argues against the idea that Tolkien and his works are racist, which had been proposed both by
Guardian columnist John Yatt and Steven Shapiro of Warwick University in 2002. "Racism is a philosophy of power, but
The Lord of the Rings functions with the Christian idea of the renouncement of power... Nothing could be more contrary to the assumptions of racism than a Hobbit as a hero."
In his 1978 essay
Epic Pooh, Michael Moorcock criticises Tolkien heavily, partly for classism:
The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beerbottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances".
He doesn’t say that orcs are racist but he hints at racism in Tolkien's writing with this reference to Rhodesia:
Their theories dignify the mood of a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint ("They kicked us out of Rhodesia, you know"), least of all to the Higher Authority, their Tory God who has evidently failed them.