Fixing racism in D&D (/rpgs in general)

[Thaluikhain]

Surely Tolkien's orcs were racist caricatures of Asians rather than Africans? Not seeing any improvement there, though.

As an aside, some time after D&D realised maybe killing people for their skin colour wasn't a great idea, someone decided to write a novel about an evil group called the "CCC" murdering orcs.

[deaddmwalking]

Orcs were originally probably a stand-in for Turks.

But they're a group that is inherently evil and trying to kill you and take your civilization.

Anyone that subscribes to a racist philosophy will be happy to consider orcs a stand-in for whatever group they think is trying to kill them and take their civilization. In the United States, this has often been seen as black Americans, but lately, Muslims seem a more popular target. Ultimately, if you want a group to be 'kill on sight' and orcs are 'kill on sight' in your game, there are going to be some people that figure that means they're whatever REAL group they wish was 'kill on sight'.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm pretty sure that Tolkien orcs conform most closely to old European tropes about the Turks.

Although, it's worth noting that as conquering industrial goons who use cockney slang, its not hard to read the orcs as English. Tolkien said that one of his prime inspirations for them was himself and his friends in WW1, where they became unreasoning cogs in a horrible machine of war.

[Bertie Wooster]

All of them are, starting with Tolkien, and it's mostly through British stereotypes of Africans, not US of African Americans, though of course there is overlap.

I'm not sure that I can agree with that. The only real trait that orcs share with British stereotypes about Africans is that they are savage. But being savage is way common among stereotypes about various people, so can you really pin it down without some other additional shared traits?

I never had an impression of LotR orcs being African. In fact they are much more often associated with Russians in Russia for a variety of reasons.

[Username17]

Yeah, Orcs as Africans is a relatively recent thing. To the extent that Orcs have been ethnically coded, they were originally conceived as the dark mirror of the British soul and travesty of war and also as Turks. Since then, they've been variously coded as pretty much every ethnic group that has been associated with savagery and/or warfare. They've been coded as Vikings, Mongols, Aztecs, and Ottomans. The Games Workshop space Orks are coded as people from Liverpool because actual British racism is dumber and smaller than you can actually believe. Shadowrun Orks are coded as American black people, but that's nothing like ubiquitous. The Chronopia Orcs that are coded as Ottoman Turks are much closer to the racist elements of the original source material.

-Username17

[Dean]

I have never bought the Tolkien Orcs as african racist caricatures thing. All of my investigations into it have led me to believe that, as has been said, orcs are intended to be a representation more of the darkness in the self than anything. I do accept that the "darkest imaginable parts of the self" from an Englishman born a century ago may include elements of unconscious racism and think the Turk comparison is fair. But I have always been made deeply deeply uncomfortable by anyone who reads the Orcs and says that it's obviously obvious that those are black people. I don't agree, I don't see it, I don't follow, and I'm made uncomfortable by people that say they do.

Some white supremacists got real into Tolkien. They wrote a lot about how, like everything else to them, Tolkien is about the superiority of the white race and they did it enough that people now accept white supremacist reinterpretations as the legitimate lens of that work and that seems like intellectually and morally gross signal boosting to me. I think it's important when we identify problematic forms of messaging in media and I think asking the question "Is this racist?" is good to do for anything but I don't think it's valuable to listen to what self identified white supremacists say about things and repeat them as if they have any intellectual or moral credibility.

[OgreBattle]

"...[Orcs] are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.[15]"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc_(Midd ... penter1981

They're based on the appearance of Mongol caricatures. Yellow peril cartoons would've been something Tolkien grew up with. But he doesn't express racism in his works. When Nagasaki & Hiroshima got atom bombed Tolkien wrote that it was a disgusting act, like hobbits riding Nazguls to fight Sauron.

He described it along the lines of "In real life there are orcs on all sides".

Warhammer 40k also has the space-British Praetorians fighting savage orks at Ork's Drift, a parallel to the battleof rourke's drift https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Ma ... Toof_River

[DSMatticus]

I do not think Tolkein modelled his orcs after racist African caricatures. You would have a better case arguing that Tolkein modelled dwarves after racist Jewish caricatures, and even then, there is a rather infamous Tolkein letter where he tells a publisher in Nazi Germany to fuck right off - "but if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people."

That said, I think we are discussing two entirely different questions. The question "did Tolkein deliberately and maliciously use racist caricatures in his work?" is a different question than "are there racist caricatures in Tolkein's works?"

The answer to the first question is possibly not. There is a very, very explicit dwarves = Jews moment, but one of our main characters is an unambiguously upstanding dwarf. "There is some truth to stereotypes, and there are always bad apples, but they are nonetheless a noble people worthy of our respect" is racist as fuck by our standards, but borderline enlightened by our (great?) grandparent's standards. And even then the stereotype comes from dialogue, not narration - are we meant to take it as fact? Was it deliberate? You'd be surprised what people can absorb and regurgitate without realizing, but yes, it was probably deliberate. Was it malicious? It really doesn't seem to be. It just hasn't aged well.

The answer to the second question is fuck yes. Even setting aside the very, very explicit dwarves = Jews thing, orcs are "repulsive" mongols with the Curse of Cain. The Curse of Cain bit almost certainly isn't deliberate, Tolkein just needed evil folklore dudes to fill out the ranks of stabbable bad guys, but it really didn't take long for other people to make the connection on his behalf. And today, orcs are considered a perfectly valid choice for a good guy faction, so the connection is almost impossible to miss in hindsight. Going from Warcraft to Lord of the Rings (which would be perfectly normal for a younger audience), it would be very, very hard to just not notice how racist that can come across. But that's not exactly Tolkein's fault, either.

Now the thing where all the human bad guys are clearly meant to be people from fantasy Africa and fantasy Asia... oof. That's rough, Tolkein. That's real, real rough.

[Thaluikhain]

Warhammer 40k also has the space-British Praetorians fighting savage orks at Ork's Drift, a parallel to the battleof rourke's drift https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Ma ... Toof_River

True, but also note:

"The first of these (Force Kaz-Ter) consisted of the Tallarn Rough Rider companies and all of the Tallarn armoured companies, and was commanded by Captain Am' Kaz-Ter of Tallarn."

You have Custer in charge of the cavalry, they've mixed Little Bighorn in as well.

(Also, local population of the system was only 700 people? Hadn't read that before)

[HereForOSSR]

Right, so the original Tolkien orcs were some kind of Turkish/Mongol/general Asian inspired thing. Although their emphasis on industrialism seems distinctly Western to me, so I don't think it's a perfect match. My uninformed impression is that they got "Africanized" when they became popular in the US. In any case their purpose is to largely stand in for the "dangerous amd savage races", whatever the author intentionally or unintentionally thinks those are.

[deaddmwalking]

Right, so the original Tolkien orcs were some kind of Turkish/Mongol/general Asian inspired thing. Although their emphasis on industrialism seems distinctly Western to me, so I don't think it's a perfect match.

Chalk that up to ignorance.

The first definite use of artillery in the region was against the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, in 1396, forcing the Ottomans to withdraw.[38] They acquired their own cannon, and laid siege to the Byzantine capital again, in 1422, using "falcons", which were short but wide cannon. Before the siege of Constantinople, it was known that the Ottomans had the ability to cast medium-sized cannons, but the range of some pieces they were able to field far surpassed the defenders' expectations. Instrumental to this Ottoman advancement in arms production was a somewhat mysterious figure by the name of Orban (Urban), a Hungarian (though some suggest he was German).[39] One cannon designed by Orban was named "Basilica" and was 27 feet (8.2 m) long, and able to hurl a 600 lb (272 kg) stone ball over a mile (1.6 km).[40]

It's easy to write onto a culture the unconscious bias that you bring. Technical sophistication is not a uniquely Western trait, nor is the pursuit of advanced technology in warfare.

[Username17]

But Tolkien isn't having the Orcs use 15th century Central Asian cannons or 13th century Chinese rockets. He is having them enact the enclosures of public land and wilderness in order to centralize and industrialize. Isengard is enacting the British industrial revolution and pursuing the British imperialism that follows from that. Middle Earth is much less global in inspiration than many people take it for, the central conflict between the Shire and Mordor is between a war mongering industrial England and an imagined pastoral peaceful England.

There are a few non-English elements thrown in on both sides, the Rohirrim are illiterate horse nomads and are considered good guys, while the Haradrim are elephant riding black people and are bad guys. But the central metaphor is British on both ends and is thus entirely unconcerned with human ethnicities. The fact that the good guys get Cossack allies and the bad guys get Seleucid allies is not a statement about Slavs good and Ethiopians bad, it's just fantasy elements thrown in the mixer. I'm not actually sure what ethnicity the people of Angmar are patterned on, but it's probably Northumberland or something.

It's easy to read a racist narrative into a science fiction or fantasy world that has actual races in it. But that doesn't mean it's there. The Klingons are in many ways inspired by the Soviet Union, but Star Trek isn't saying that Russians are bad people - they actually have Chekhov and he's a very good person. Tolkien has some casual racisms, because he's a British white guy who grew up in frickin South Africa. But he's not creating a racist narrative or using the medium to transmit racist ideas. Tolkien wasn't Lovecraft. The Lamia from Medusa's Coil are inherently racist against black people, the Orcs from Lord of the Rings are not.

-Username17

[HereForOSSR]

(P.S. - I'm now posting under the name "Unity", because I decided to start posting instead of just browsing OSSRs)

Right, so the original Tolkien orcs were some kind of Turkish/Mongol/general Asian inspired thing. Although their emphasis on industrialism seems distinctly Western to me, so I don't think it's a perfect match.

Chalk that up to ignorance.

The first definite use of artillery in the region was against the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, in 1396, forcing the Ottomans to withdraw.[38] They acquired their own cannon, and laid siege to the Byzantine capital again, in 1422, using "falcons", which were short but wide cannon. Before the siege of Constantinople, it was known that the Ottomans had the ability to cast medium-sized cannons, but the range of some pieces they were able to field far surpassed the defenders' expectations. Instrumental to this Ottoman advancement in arms production was a somewhat mysterious figure by the name of Orban (Urban), a Hungarian (though some suggest he was German).[39] One cannon designed by Orban was named "Basilica" and was 27 feet (8.2 m) long, and able to hurl a 600 lb (272 kg) stone ball over a mile (1.6 km).[40]

It's easy to write onto a culture the unconscious bias that you bring. Technical sophistication is not a uniquely Western trait, nor is the pursuit of advanced technology in warfare.

Cannons do not represent Ottoman technology in Lord of the Rings because there are no cannons in Lord of the Rings.

The Lamia from Medusa's Coil are inherently racist against black people, the Orcs from Lord of the Rings are not.

I should have specified - I don't think the Tolkien portrayal of orcs is actually racist, rather that things moved in that direction over time. The problem I have is when people started grafting tropes about non-Western human races onto Tolkien's savage evil orc template.

[Thaluikhain]

Having all the heroes (and good nations and species) be white (or ambiguously white in the case of some halflings) and all the people who aren't white be the villains (including degenerate monsters that are ugly specifically in the way Asians are supposed to be to Europeans) still seems rather racist to me. It's perfectly true to say that he wasn't obsessed with racial purity the way, say, Lovecraft was, but low bar.

Personally, I'd just say "of his time" and maybe hope people don't just copy and paste everything he did without thinking about it.

[Username17]

Having all the heroes (and good nations and species) be white (or ambiguously white in the case of some halflings) and all the people who aren't white be the villains (including degenerate monsters that are ugly specifically in the way Asians are supposed to be to Europeans) still seems rather racist to me. It's perfectly true to say that he wasn't obsessed with racial purity the way, say, Lovecraft was, but low bar.

Personally, I'd just say "of his time" and maybe hope people don't just copy and paste everything he did without thinking about it.

But as previously noted: the Dwarves are patterned very closely on Jews. And in his day, the Jews were very definitely not considered "white." There was a whole war that happened about it. The entire idea that there aren't any non-white good guys in LotR or the Hobbit requires historical revisionism and the acceptance of racist conceptual frameworks that didn't even exist when the books were written.

The Hobbit is the story of a lone Englishman accompanying a dozen non-white heroes on a quest. If Semitic people are considered "white" today (and there's substantial debate on that point), Lord of the Ring's casual treatment of them as being "not other" is a significant reason why.

-Username17

[Lokey]

Now the thing where all the human bad guys are clearly meant to be people from fantasy Africa and fantasy Asia... oof. That's rough, Tolkein. That's real, real rough.

That's what I was thinking. Don't let racists ruin everythign

[angelfromanotherpin]

Now the thing where all the human bad guys are clearly meant to be people from fantasy Africa and fantasy Asia... oof. That's rough, Tolkein. That's real, real rough.

Well, there are also the Dunlendings, who are non-African/Asian human bad guys, probably inspired by Celts. Still probably based in toxic racial context given the historical anti-Irish and anti-Scot animus.

[souran]

But Tolkien isn't having the Orcs use 15th century Central Asian cannons or 13th century Chinese rockets. He is having them enact the enclosures of public land and wilderness in order to centralize and industrialize. Isengard is enacting the British industrial revolution and pursuing the British imperialism that follows from that. Middle Earth is much less global in inspiration than many people take it for, the central conflict between the Shire and Mordor is between a war mongering industrial England and an imagined pastoral peaceful England.

There are a few non-English elements thrown in on both sides, the Rohirrim are illiterate horse nomads and are considered good guys, while the Haradrim are elephant riding black people and are bad guys. But the central metaphor is British on both ends and is thus entirely unconcerned with human ethnicities. The fact that the good guys get Cossack allies and the bad guys get Seleucid allies is not a statement about Slavs good and Ethiopians bad, it's just fantasy elements thrown in the mixer. I'm not actually sure what ethnicity the people of Angmar are patterned on, but it's probably Northumberland or something.

It's easy to read a racist narrative into a science fiction or fantasy world that has actual races in it. But that doesn't mean it's there. The Klingons are in many ways inspired by the Soviet Union, but Star Trek isn't saying that Russians are bad people - they actually have Chekhov and he's a very good person. Tolkien has some casual racisms, because he's a British white guy who grew up in frickin South Africa. But he's not creating a racist narrative or using the medium to transmit racist ideas. Tolkien wasn't Lovecraft. The Lamia from Medusa's Coil are inherently racist against black people, the Orcs from Lord of the Rings are not.

-Username17

This, this is the version that the available evidence seems to support. Tolkien left a shitload of notes. He pretty clearly explains why he did things. We have talked a lot about about his dwarves. His own notes explain that as a linguist and folklorist his initial depictions of dwarves used lots of Norse imagery. Then he started pulling in Wagnerian elements which resulted in his dwarves gaining semetic qualities. He felt that those qualities gave them a better tragic backstory and so he expanded many of these elements to create a narrative of a people repeatedly cast out of their homes.

Is this cultural appropriation? Possibly? Probably? Does the fact that he is an academic trying to create synthesis cultures affect the answer? Is it racist? Again, I don't know. We know the intent is not to make statements about real world Jews. However, good intent does not make things not racist. A similar example can be found in in the Rohirrim. They are culturally Saxon. Not "English" or Britishi but Saxon, except the are a Stepp horse people whose lifestyle is, as frank pointed out, Cossack.

I wouldn't dream of saying a White British man who came of age in the early 1900s was not racist, but his racism is not of the type that his monstrous creatures are just thinly veiled versions of real world peoples. Celts/Anglo-Saxons/Britts and Scandanavian people have been depicting "goblins" for over a Millennia. Orc is a related to a Celtic word for a kind of Demon. Tolkien was working from existing folklore that told of green skinned fey creatures that snatched and ate babies. If they have Asiatic features it probably has more to do with medieval peoples ascribing features from the invading eastern peoples onto their deceptions of monsters and Tolkien recycling those descriptions than a direct desire to attribute "undesirable" but distinctly eastern features on the bad guys. Again, there is a kind of racisim there but it is not the "orcs are Asian expies" type.

Tolkien was pretty clear that the bad guys in the lord of the rings represent Warmongers, Nationalists, and Industrialists rather than any particular race. Orcs are not supposed to represent "savage" peoples under British rule, they are supposed to be the evil soulless cog-in-the-machine killers that modern wars require. They are Europeans in the trenches killing men who they don't know and who never personally did anything to each other because generals demand it.

[maglag]

They are Europeans in the trenches killing men who they don't know and who never personally did anything to each other because generals demand it.

That last bit in particular.

It should be remembered that it's Sauron and Sauruman the ones organizing the orcs armies and assorted foreign humans forces. We even get some glimpses of the orcs POV and they don't even enjoy that whole industrial warfare business, but Sauron's will and magic are just too strong for them to disobey. When Sauron finally falls, the orcs are all too happy to stop fighting and go away now that they no longer have that voice in their head telling them to obey and fight for their master's profit. Similarly the foreign human allies either had been seduced through pacts with Mordor and/or were acting out of old grudges that had been exploited by Sauron and Sauruman.

Plus, Sauruman the White is first introduced as part of team "good" but then is revealed to have been seduced by Sauron's industrialism for quite some time.

The Huruk-Hai in particular have literally just been born yesterday. All they know of the world is what Sauruman the White told them. And Sauruman the White told them to go forth and kill and destroy and feast on human flesh. The Hurk-Hai are literally mass-produced soldiers brainwashed by propaganda all their lives, killing people they've never met just because their wizard-general told them so.[/i][/b]

[Thaluikhain]

But as previously noted: the Dwarves are patterned very closely on Jews. And in his day, the Jews were very definitely not considered "white." There was a whole war that happened about it. The entire idea that there aren't any non-white good guys in LotR or the Hobbit requires historical revisionism and the acceptance of racist conceptual frameworks that didn't even exist when the books were written.

The Hobbit is the story of a lone Englishman accompanying a dozen non-white heroes on a quest. If Semitic people are considered "white" today (and there's substantial debate on that point), Lord of the Ring's casual treatment of them as being "not other" is a significant reason why.

-Username17

True, I was overlooking the dwarfs. As an aside, how obvious would have been the Jewish influence to people who'd merely read the Hobbit and/or LotR without knowing about Tolkiens ideas? Though, that's not relevant in the context of Tolkien himself, he obviously (to a greater or lesser extent) was inspired by Jews, it's just that I never realised that the Orcs were supposed to look Asian upon simply reading LotR (re-reading it there are a few instances mentions of slant eyes).

It should be remembered that it's Sauron and Sauruman the ones organizing the orcs armies and assorted foreign humans forces. We even get some glimpses of the orcs POV and they don't even enjoy that whole industrial warfare business, but Sauron's will and magic are just too strong for them to disobey. When Sauron finally falls, the orcs are all too happy to stop fighting and go away now that they no longer have that voice in their head telling them to obey and fight for their master's profit. Similarly the foreign human allies either had been seduced through pacts with Mordor and/or were acting out of old grudges that had been exploited by Sauron and Sauruman.

Plus, Sauruman the White is first introduced as part of team "good" but then is revealed to have been seduced by Sauron's industrialism for quite some time.

The Huruk-Hai in particular have literally just been born yesterday. All they know of the world is what Sauruman the White told them. And Sauruman the White told them to go forth and kill and destroy and feast on human flesh. The Hurk-Hai are literally mass-produced soldiers brainwashed by propaganda all their lives, killing people they've never met just because their wizard-general told them so.[/i][/b]

Tolkien did explicitly say that the orcs were inherently evil, being degraded versions of the elves the same way that trolls were of ents, IIRC.

The trolls and orcs also tend to be working class.

[OgreBattle]

So how do you write subhuman orcs to kill on sight without turning it into political stuff

[Thaluikhain]

Make them totally inhuman? 40k style fungus monsters, say.

[angelfromanotherpin]

So how do you write subhuman orcs to kill on sight without turning it into political stuff

You don't, generally speaking. Nowadays, you should probably focus on wicked organizations rather than wicked ethnicities; anything else is playing into racist tropes. It's fine to shoot SS officers, but not Germans. But that doesn't avoid being political because Nazi apologists are making a big comeback lately.

You can try going the Mind Flayer route where alien biology means that they don't have civilians or children and are literally incapable of not committing capital crimes, but even that conforms to certain extreme racist narratives.

The only alternative I can come up with is going pseudo-undead. You could have orcs that were corpses animated by very minor evil spirits. I can't think of a racist narrative that plays into. But while they could fill an orcy role, you probably wouldn't call them orcs at that point.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

The orcs are evil only because Sauron and Melkor made them evil, and I don't mean in a mark of ham bullshit way that you would hear from pseudoscientists, I mean through constant abuse and fear. Look at the part where Sam is sneaking around after Frodo gets captured - the orcs' motivation is mostly fear of their inhuman master rather than just being demons or some similarly unoriginal garbage.

The orcs' being evil is less of a "orcs are inherently evil" and more of the fact that they live in a culture bent to the whims of tyranny. The orcs are not evil because of their genetics, the orcs are evil because their society is run on fear and the lash and they're raised to exact tyrannical control. Go read the end of the Two Towers again, where Sam is spying on the orcs.

'No, I don't know', said Gorbag's voice. "The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. But I don't enquire how it's done. Safest not to. Grr! Those Nazgul give me the creeps. And they skin the body off you soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side. But He likes 'em, they're His favorites nowadays, so it's no use grumbling. I tell you, it's no game serving down in the city.

'You should try being up here with Shelob for company,' said Shagrat.

'I'd like to try somewhere where there's none of 'em. But the war's on now, and when that's over things may be easier.'

'It's going well, they say.'

'They would,' grunted Gorbag. 'We'll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d'you say-if we get a chance, you and me'll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there's good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.'

'Ah!' said Shagrat. 'Like old times.'

'Yes,' said Gorbag. 'But don't count on it. I'm not easy in my mind. As I said, the Big Bosses, ay,' his voice sank almost to a whisper, 'ay, even the Biggest, can make mistakes. Something nearly slipped, you say. I say, something has slipped. And we've got to look out. Always the poor Uruks to put slips right, and small thanks. But don't forget, the enemies don't love us any more than they love Him, and if they get topsides on Him, we're done too.

So yes, Tolkien's orcs are violent (and further discuss killing and eating poor Frodo later in the passage) but it's violence in an attempt to gain power when they feel powerless from constantly being abused by Sauron. It's much less stupid eugenics bullshit than a "this is your brain on fascism and abuse" deal. These are surprisingly human orcs with human motivations who happen to be forced into the service of an abhorrent regime and raised not with compassion but with violence.

Natually, because modern fantasy writers and D&D designers are completely divorced from such things as "competent storytelling" and "themes" we get a lot of hack writers creating always evil orcs because characterizing villains is hard but coming up with bullshit convoluted "magic systems" is easy.

[Username17]

As an aside, how obvious would have been the Jewish influence to people who'd merely read the Hobbit and/or LotR without knowing about Tolkiens ideas?

Depends on how well you know Jews. Dwarvish as described is clearly a Semitic language, but if you don't know what a Semitic Language looks like or sounds like, I don't know what good that's going to do you. They also have the whole history of being alternately accepted and forced out of their homes again and again with a large diaspora. But again, if you don't know your Jewish history that won't be obvious.

But if you're familiar with European histories of pogroms, it is obvious.

Tolkien did explicitly say that the orcs were inherently evil, being degraded versions of the elves the same way that trolls were of ents, IIRC.

Tolkien goes back and forth on this. On one hand, people being inherently bad is necessary for it to be morally justifiable to stab them with a spear without inquiring about their political views first; and on the other hand the idea of 'evil races' is part of the fascist worldview that Tolkien despised. And because Tolkien waffled on this point, it's trivially easy to quote mine support for one version or the other.

Anyway, the larger issue there is that in World War 2 the pastoralists were the bad guys and the industrialists were the good guys. The fact that Tolkien's idea of a romanticized past with peaceful pastoralism fits better into an Axis propaganda framework than it does into an Allied narrative is something that Tolkien struggled with his entire life. He's not unaware of the issue, he's genuinely angry that white supremacists like some of his ideas and explore similar literary themes in the service of a philosophy he easily identifies as the greatest evil of his day.

But really this is all a sideshow. The original quote that set this tangent off is this one:

By removing the racist bits, these orcs now have almost nothing in common with stereotypes of black people. But they also have almost nothing in common with orcs.

And that's wrong. A majority of Orcs haven't been stand-ins for black people. Indeed, to the extent that Tolkien's Orcs had racist content it was casual racist content towards Central Asians. It is in fact easy to write Orky Orcs who Orc without having any particular African content. There are examples of Orcs in various fictional media who are partially or wholly stand-ins for black people (most notably Shadowrun, where the Orks as African Americans is explicit and used to make various statements about American racism directly), but it's not necessary or even particularly common.

Where Orcs are coded as one or more groups of real-world humans, a majority of them are not coded as Africans. Heroes VI codes them as Central Americans. Chronopia codes them as Middle Eastern, Warhammer 40K codes them as British North Westerners. It's clearly pretty easy to write Orcs who aren't black people expies.

-Username17