Originally Posted by
Gwyn chan r Gwyll
tl;dr, Tolkein clearly codes racist stereotypes into his works, including orientalist stereotypes, but at least in the case of East-Asian and anti-Semitic stereotypes, acknowledges that it's what he's doing, and the team is merely following that. I personally find this acceptable working off flawed source material, to say "Yes this is uncomfortable, but it's what we have for now".
Eh, I'd say he was conscious of racism around him, by the standards of his time he wasn't racist, but he relied on racist caricatures in his work to get across his mostly anti-racist points. For example, he once said in a letter that the Dwarves were based on Jews, or rather, English stereotypes of Jews. This plus the close friendship between Legolas and Gimli has often been interpreted to be a critique of the de facto segregation between Jews and non-Jewish/Gentile communities, which is a positive portrayal, but that doesn't get around the fact that the Jewish-coded Dwarves are portrayed as greedy, lovers of gold and beautiful craftsmanship. There are many other ways in which his portrayal of the Dwarves is meant to evoke Judaism, which I can elaborate on later, but primarily you can also link their language, which is clearly Semitic (triconsonantal roots) and their diaspora. Tolkein in his letters was stridently Antifa and he wrote some wonderfully biting letters addressing Nazi anti-Semitism in the pre-war era, which I would recommend giving a good read.
More on-topic, there's his treatment of Asian and Black coding in his works. The Orcs are coded in as Asian, described often as "slant-eyed", and Tolkein in a letter once called them "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types". Again, half-points here for recognizing that the stereotypes of the unwashed Asiatic horde he bases his inhuman monstrous race on are, indeed, stereotypes, and clearly qualifying them as such, so for his time perhaps progressive, by our standards still racist.
His use of the term "swarthy" is also an issue. Even in Bree, the 'suspicious' characters are described as having darker skin as part of what made them suspicious. The Easterlings are "swarthy", as are for some reason the Dunlendings, while the Southrons are black-skinned, in contrast with the Easterlings dark-skinned. Take also the work "Mumakil", one of the few Haradrim words we know, in which I see clear Arabic influences; compare the Arabic word "Mamluk", which we should all know. Additionally, Mumakil fits Arabic noun form "Mufaa'il", in which the F, ', and L all stand in for other letters. The form Mufaa'il means "the one who deals with fa'ala", where fa'ala is the basic verb. Luckily for Tolkein, Makala is not a word, so Mumakil doesn't have some awkward second meaning. Tolkein was, of course, well versed in all types of languages, and showed in constructing the Dwarven language that he fully understood how tri-consonantal languages such as Hebrew and Arabic worked, so he would have been familiar with the Mufaa'il construction.
This is perhaps more problematic than the previous points, because Tolkein DOESN'T at any point that I'm aware of address the fact that the primary antagonist human races are coded as non-white, while the primary protagonist human races are coded as white. The best he does is have Sam wonder, in one of my favourite moments, whether the dead Southrons were truly evil at heart, or manipulated good people. But he never outright acknowledges that he bases them on stereotypes of good-Westerners-vs-evil-Easterners, as he does the other racial stereotypes he uses.