Obviously you and I see the world differently. Speaking as a white man, if I read in a story that a black-skinned orc defeated a white-skinned elf, I wouldn't think twice about racial overtones. I can't imagine thinking, "Ah, this is some black racist's fantasy about killing white people." Now that you brought the subject up, I wonder how many people, black, white, yellow, or whatever, see racial overtones in such things. I realize that not everyone thinks just like me. Just because the idea never occurred to me of course doesn't mean that others don't think of it.
Occurs to me: I've got a running joke with my wife. She likes martial arts movies. And I regularly say, "You just like these movies because you like to see white people beat each other up." (My wife is black.)
@Galastel I can certainly see a more subtle racism slipping in to a visual medium than writing. In a movie, a character can, for example, be portrayed by a black actor, and that's obvious to the audience without anyone mentioning it. The producer might say -- honestly or disingenuously -- that the actor had to be SOME color, and he didn't mean anything by the choice. But in a book, if you explicitly say, "this guy is black", then it's harder to say that you didn't think it mattered.
@Galastel My wife and I regularly joke about racism. Like once we went to a concert and the ticket taker dropped her ticket. Later I joked that I should have said, "Did you throw my wife's ticket on the floor just because she's black?" She laughed and said that I should have, we could have created a big scene and had fun. But I have been pleased to observe that we see very little actual, real racism.
@Beanluc If you leap to conclusions about someone just because he's a white man, that's racist and sexist, by definition. :-)
@LaurenIpsum Well sure, if you replace a phrase with another phrase that means something entirely different, you change the meaning of the sentence. I could imagine a world in which we replaced the phrase "person with red hair" with "incompetent fool", and that would change the meaning of everything said about people with red hair. And it would prove nothing, unless you started with the assumption that all red-haired people are incompetent fools. (No offense intended against red-haired people, just an example.)
FWIW, I discussed this thread with my wife, who as I mentioned is black, and she said that she never saw any racial overtones to the color of elves and ogres either. From there we drifted to a conversation about real racism -- people being denied jobs because of their color and that sort of thing -- and what we both saw as going out of one's way to find subtle sort-of maybe racism.
@TRiG Well, we're veering off into an argument here. "Political correctness" is only about calling SOME people by the names they choose. Like people who support political correctness don't shy from calling people they disagree with "racist" and "Nazi" and "homophobe", even when those people object to those labels. More important, "political correctness" is normally used to include many political and social issues besides just "calling people by the names they choose". You can't lump a whole bunch of things together, then pick one and say, "if you support this, than you must support all".
@trig It doesn't necessarily follow that a while man would notice racism less than a black person. Lots of people who talk a great deal about racism are white. I've heard many white people talk about how racist it is to use Indian names for sports teams, despite the fact that polls routinely show that the majority of actual Indians are not offended by them.