When people say Tolkien did this, it really gets on my nerves. You have to willfully misread what he wrote to think he was equating Orcs with non-European people, especially because darker skinned humans appear in his fiction (albeit as soldiers of the enemy; however, he devotes time in Lord of the Rings having Frodo actively wonder about the life left behind by one of those soldiers), and he compared himself and his war comrades to Orcs during the Great War directly.

And I know that people site that in his description of what Orcs look like he described their faces as "(to European eyes) the most unlovely of Mongoloid races". The above qualification alone indicates that he did not believe "Mongoloid" faces were objectively unlovely. Also, Orcs are not in principle unredeemable Always Chaotic Evil, they are merely slaves to a supernatural power which they cannot break free from. Quite different from the standard characterization.

This is a vile slander that gets repeated again and again by people with an axe to grind as though it is an established fact, when it is most definitely not. There are plenty of serious targets out there who are actually guilty of using racist stereotypes; stop going after Tolkien.