I'm gonna stay in my lane and not comment on today's discourse, beyond this: if you create a sapient "race" of beings, making them innately evil is fucked up. Especially if you give them traits that mirror real-world cultures oppressed for being "savage" or "sub-human."

Okay I have a little more to say. Modern fantasy (esp. in the west, but I think this problem is global) suffers from a crisis of identity: fairy tales versus epics. Fairy tales are simple morality plays, whereas epics are complex and grounded in real-world crises.

Goblins and orcs and gnomes and so forth are fairy tale creatures that embody morality. Greed. Wrath. Ingenuity. They're reflections of the self.

In epic fantasy, this idea gets twisted into realistic, racial terms. They no longer critique the self, but the "other."

If you want to include fairy tale creatures that are irredeemably and naturally evil, your world needs to be a fairy tale world, too. Fairy tale worlds are humanocentric; they focus on humans. And that humanocentric world should reflect the diversity of humanity IRL.

All other creatures are reflections of human nature. In a fairy tale world, goblins and orcs and drow aren't stereotypes of nonwestern cultures. They're us. The worst parts of us. In this simplistic, moralistic world, goblin is something a human becomes, through evil action.

The way that fairy tales links evil behavior with ugliness and inhumanness isn't unproblematic, but it's not racist—to my knowledge, at least. If this fairy tale framing and right-and-wrong morality is made explicitly clear to your audience, it could work.

Even Tolkien loved this. Look at Gollum! But this simplistic view doesn't fit into epic fantasies with races and genealogies and all those things Tolkien loved. Gollum wasn't a race, he was a being. And even he wasn't evil by nature; he was in constant struggle.

But we can't mention fantasy and racism without bringing up his evil brown Haradrim and the evil "Mongol-type" orcs. It can't be avoided. If you try to make epic fantasy with fairy tale moralism, you will fall into this age-old trap. Almost certainly.

How do you avoid being "accidentally" racist? Don't make intelligent beings evil by default. Don't make those races have monocultures. Including individuals that break the mold and are "a credit to their race" like Drizzt doesn't help.

And for god's sake, don't talk about them gaining a "limited capacity for empathy" when they're "domesticated." Good lord.