As compared other races drow are more intelligent (proclivity for magic), more sophisticated (treacherous, scheming) , and less physical (lower constitutions). Drow are short, thin and, well, pixie like. Exclude the charcoal colored skin, it's almost like the drow are mirror opposite of the African stereotype. Or fuck the "almost like" -- the drow are so far away from the racist stereotype of Africans that they can't be compared. If Sturevant can't see that, I can't help him.
There was a lot about your brief overlook on Tolkien's work that I found puzzling if not openly debatable, but in the end what's relevant to this thread here is this passage.
This is a good summary of why it's always extremely confusing when people tries to draw a direct comparison and imply the "Drows are painted as bad because they are mean to represent African people, so their existence should be offensive for people of African lineage".
No, they are not, so no it shouldn't be, rationally speaking.
P.S. On the topic of "binary division between good and evil" and how "it all began with Tolkien" according to some people, it's somewhat important to stress for context that Tolkien's narrative didn't lack "nuance" out of naivety, but out of a deliberate stylistic choice.
The man was perfectly aware of writing stories where "good and bad were two very distinct sides" (more or less, given that the good side always started divide and had an uphill battle to come together as one, while the evil was almost always a corruption of what began as good) and he openly commented about it in a lot of letters he wrote.
He even went far enough to stress that he wanted to avoid moral ambiguity because it wasn't a good fit for the type of epic he aimed for. Some of his most recent writings even commented on the attempts to write a sequel for Lord of the Rings, but he decided soon enough that "it was a very depressing and dark tale about some of the most unflattering sides of humanity and not something worth telling" (not an exact quote; I'm fishing from years-old memories).