I'm surprised this this thread is still going, more that some of it is actually interesting.
I think we have two camps, people who think fantasy races are stand-ins for human stereotype and behavior generalization, and people who see them as distinct races that are fundamentally different from the real world experience. And to be fair they've been both before.
I think the root of this discussion comes from how we have a term 'race' that has two meanings, race in an scientific sense and race in an anthropological sense. Race for a long time was a cultural construct, but with the development of the living sciences, they got mixed together, working backwards every culture was a possible reflection of an inherent biological difference. There is no such thing.
But the problem for D&D is, there is such a thing. Humans, Dwarfs, Elves, Goblins and Orcs are actually difference races. This can make people uncomfortable because for some people a story has value only as far as it intersects with the real world. There are no races in the real world, so Dwarfs Elves Orcs etc. are only useful in the story as ways of talking about humanity. So every Dwarf is an allegory about greed, or tradition, every Elf an idealized representation of what a culture considers virtue, and Orcs the opposite. In D&D there are races that don't average a 10 intelligence, they are inherently less intelligent than a human, so for people who view every race as just an allegory for the real world, than what is being said here?
The other facet about this is Alignment, races have inherent tendencies towards good and evil, for the same people who view a story as only a commentary on the their own experience, then this means that people are born good or evil by virtue of their race. But while the question of morality is something we've spent a lot of time and ink throughout history, for the post-modern recontextualizing of D&D the conversation tends to over look or downplay a few things. D&D's setting ranges from faux Middle Ages, to faux Renaissance, but whatever the technology level, it's pretty firmly a picaresque of pre-Enlightenment Europe (and 19th Century Europe's view of 18th Century Asia) furthermore there can never be a Rights of Man revolution in Faerun because there is no veil between our understanding of the divine, the Gods exist, they smite the nonbeliever and they have a moral compass; you can be an atheist in Faerun by not following a god, you can be an antitheist by resenting their power, but you cannot be agnostic. I don't think Evolution is a thing in D&D either, so inherent behavioral norms will not be a result of, nor impact the development of a species.
I'm not someone who looks to fiction to better understand the world, if that happens all the better, I do go into fiction looking for interesting ideas. And possibly learn something about myself.
