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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.
I don’t mean they have the innsmouth look (which is a racist reference actually), i mean they have the same adaptation to darkness that many deep sea fish do (they aren’t all pale or translucent, and I’d like to point out that other evil underdark races are incredibly pale too).
As for orcs, yes I’m referring to stereotypes because that’s what people are accusing them of being. They match the very broad thing that every racist tries to apply to every race, because they were an evil species, but if you pick the brain of a racist you’ll hear things that absolutely don’t match dnd orcs. As for dreads, and I’d like to stress I’m only bringing this up because it was a point often brought up when this nontroversy was popular, they were independently developed across europe and asia.
If anything, the real racism was simply excluding other cultures entirely.