I guess I’ll make my tweet about orcs since I’m somewhat involved in D&D stuff: Orcs don’t need to be special to be calm, intelligent, or lawful good. Orcs can be anything your humans and elves and halflings can be. Orcs can and should be diverse in the same ways humans are.

On that note, think about your setting and your story. Are your humans all European analogs? Are they all white and live in cities and villages with feudal systems? Are your elves all Northern European or Asian analogs? How many nonwhite humans and elves are in your world?

Part of contributing to the racist history of the non-human/elf races in fantasy is maintaining the white supremacy inherent in having the “civilized” people all be white, thereby relegating other real world cultures to the non-human/elf races.

Put black humans in your games. Both as NPCs and as players.

On that note, too, don’t frame the validity of orcs in relation to their supposed humanity if that humanity is based in whiteness. If you say your orcs aren’t racist caricatures because they’re “civilized” you’re framing civilization through a specific lens. Be careful.

So in short, you can’t just tackle the racist history around orcs by making your orcs white. You have to address white supremacy in your setting, too. That’s where the writers of D&D have often fell short in the past, but hopefully we’ll see that interrogated more in the future.