@Sozz, good summary! Great points about how the certain knowledge of the divine changes the conversation.

Originally Posted by Black_Elk
It just seems like a problematic approach to make the Drow explicitly racial like that though. I mean do they really want to go that way, and say 'yeah, that's what the Drow were all along' ? Because that's what the implication would seem to be with a recasting. They'd have a lot of ground to make up to salvage anything really going that route.

Rather than starting from the premise that the Drow were coded black folks in D&D, I suppose they could also just make the most evil faction of the Drow even more explicitlly white looking than they already are. I mean the Drow are probably the whitest looking race in D&D for everything other than their skintone already. In most illustrations anyway. I mean they don't appear particularly black, if you're just looking at what's in front of you. And they have been steadily making the Drow more light skinned and blue and purple and gray than black as time goes on.

Well said. Exactly. Instead of saying "this was racist all along" they should have made them white. I think the movie the time machine (not an unproblematic story either) got the aesthetics right:

[Linked Image from martynglanville.com]

As far as Gygax, I think he was doing two things: he was trying to implement the dark elves from nordic mythos (which apparently was synonymous with dwarves) and, since this was the 70s, he was probably thinking of a photo negative -- thus the white hair. When I look at myself in photo negatives I look like a drow. Did Gygax have problematic beliefs? Sure. Do I think he was using drow as a stand in for Africans? No.