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I dislike this article. It’s a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.
Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that’s an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It’s an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it’s an unsound basis for any form of logic.
Let’s do a thought experiment:
If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?
If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they’re talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? “But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!” I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can’t square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.
Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.
Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you’ll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.
You can criticize a lot about the writing of dnd, but this was a very stupid controversy. The orc and drow things were especially stupid, it takes more than dreads or purple skin to invoke the racist caricature that people accused wizards of.
I thought the reason people had issues with the drow was due to the parallels between their origin and a specific interpretation of the biblical Curse of Ham.
Did they? That’s odd. Gygax said they were intended to be trolls as even the name “Drow” is a Scottish word for the same.
The Drow are grey-purple (or pitch black if you’re talking about the originals) and their entire lore is completely different. I don’t really see that parallels at all. Other than skin colour mentioned, what does that have to do with the Curse of Ham?
(An aside: I ran a campaign with all players playing Drow where all were Lawful Good because they were deemed so by Drow societal laws. It was fun and put everyone in an odd headspace for that game.)