Regardless of the fact that the word brings up bad feelings for some people, these are all so awkward and inaccurate that it's hard to fault Gygax for choosing "race", especially since the dictionary definition of "race" he was using (2a rather than 1a) is not the one that most modern readers will think of. We're not actually changing the idea when we change the word sound we label that idea with. If anything we are just inventing a new definition of the word, so that the new word now means the same as the old one and will in its time be seen as wrong.
I'm not going to participate in the debate around the word, because first I don't care that much since every word change of this sort is meaningless - shuffling labels for ideas doesn't alter ideas - and secondly because it seems predicated over the confusion of having a single word with like 10 different definitions. Most of the arguments to me seem akin to confusing the writer's intent with discussion of an athletic contest and fighting over that. Change it to whatever you like, and I'll shrug or chuckle depending on what you change it to.
Still, it's strange to see "race" moving toward becoming a profanity or obscenity. It's strange because I don't think it's going to do anything to make people more compassionate toward one another, but profanity and how it is chosen by society is always a strange concept if you think about it. What is tame in one language is unspeakably vulgar in another, and humans will become more enraged about how something is said than what was actually said or meant. Which is both and at the same time a justification for treating words as obscenities or profanities, and also displays how silly the whole thing is.
