I think this whole thing is honestly focusing on the wrong race if it's gonna even be a topic. Focusing on the drow just because they have darker skin tones, even though their goddess and most of the culture is all about being evil? It's like someone just saw a picture of a drow, heard they were typically evil, and went "THAT'S RACIST!" without bothering to hear any of the lore or anything behind it. How about the tieflings? The tieflings are literally just like any other person except they look different, they aren't predisposed to either good or evil, and typically the ones who turn to evil do so only because all of society is constantly expecting them to turn out evil just so they can say "I told you so". But instead of pointing out the very real racism the tieflings face that is much more like what we have in the real world, where people are racist against others simply because of how they look, they just went with the race that typically has dark skin which seems rather racist on it's own if you ask me. They singled out the race with darker skin, heard they were evil, and screamed racism, all while overlooking the race that actually has the closest ties to real world racism just because they look like devils instead of simply being dark skinned. The drow are literally raised to be evil by their own culture and their actual goddess, while the tieflings are simply born with horns, tails, and different skin colors and no predisposition to any alignment aside from what everyone basically tries to force down their throats that they "have evil in their blood" basically.
I agree that, if the goal of D&D writers is to make social commentary on racism, tieflings would be a much better comparison. As you say, tieflings are a much closer analogue to real world "races" than the drow: basically only a visual difference and they grow up in the same society as humans. Stories about drow would be better at exploring themes like: overcoming growing up in authoritative & ruthless societies, breaking away from tradition, overcoming nurtured learning. However, the potential problem with drow is implicit racism, not intentional analogies used to make a point. Tieflings by themselves don't obviously reflect a certain real-world ethnic group, while the drow trait of dark skin (they were originally called "Black Elves" o.O) has an obvious real world analogy.
It doesn't really matter that there's an in-universe explanation - nurture via Lolth's influence - for drow being evil. The whole point is that
the race in D&D distinguished from their base-race (elves) by their dark skin was created to be
all mostly evil. Is this just a coincidence? Or was there implicit racism in the creation of drow, equating dark skin with being evil? And how does this reinforce racism in today's society, if at all? If the answers to the latter two questions are "yes" and/or "a lot," then there's a problem.
Imagine if all D&D humans with brown skin were a majority evil society, whereas all the more fair-skinned humans were not evil. No matter the reason given, even it was because of their god, that'd still be concerning at best.
tl;dr: Tieflings facing racism is a good analogy for real world racism, but this is a separate issue from whether or not drow being evil is problematic.
