That’s not what I am talking about. I didn’t pick those attributes.
Let me give an example of explicit racial coding in fantasy. Bright, the Will Smith movie on Netflix. There the racial coding is not even subtext, it’s explicit text. Orcs are deliberately coded as inner city black.
It’s not the orc traits that are the coding, it’s the dress, language, style, etc.
Now Tolkien did not have that type of explicit coding of orcs. In fact I wouldn’t say Tolkien orcs were coded as anything except as an echo of the Biblical angels cast from heaven narrative. Which tracks with much of the rest of the Silmarillion, much of the story is a deliberate follow of the creation myth.
However through the years in many lesser pulp stories the orcs, dwarves, elves, etc have been coded as different cultures. Sometimes innocently or innocuously, sometimes not.
For an example of coding in Tolkien, see the Southron men. They are an intentional Persian pastiche. Their darker complexion, style, elephants, etc are all nods to the armies of Xerxes. Now that may not have been intentional, but the only darker skinned humans in LotR are the evil Sauron aligned ones. Which is the kind of thing that would get red flags today.
And again, my point is not that Tolkien himself coded racism into his orcs. Just that in the decades that followed we did see examples where this happened. And D&D, by being a loose thematic framework for the mechanics, certainly at times could lend itself to people, either by intent or accident, reverting to lazy and occasionally racist tropes.
That’s not a flaw with D&D, per se. just how lazy pop culture was too often used to using shorthand references to actual peoples and cultures in their world building without considering the implications of having the only non white identifiable groups be the bad guys. People recognize it more today, and for the better.
But the history of Orientalism and othering, especially in Victorian era writings, is a thing.
