Gary Gygax was a latter-day phrenologist (biological determinist), a deeply racist guy who borrowed heavily from Tolkien and Tolkien clones and took their mostly inoffensive material and made it super racist.

When I was a teenager I read a bunch of the RA Salvatore Forgotten Realms novels. The whole idea behind those books is "what if a drow wasn't ontologically evil." About a dozen books into that series the same treatment is given to orcs. Unfortunately, my hazy recollection of the "orcs are actually misunderstood" books is that they veered into a whole host of other culturally insensitive tropes.