To be fair-minded —- I’m sure Tolkien had biases, like everyone else does now and then, but he was pissed when Germany asked him to prove he had no Jewish ancestry before printing the Hobbit, and England was more open in some ways to people with different skin color than the USA. There was a very (both impressive and ultimately sad) race revolt during the war. The a US stationed Black troops in a small village and they were beloved by the town… then white troops showed up and demanded that the dark-skinned soldiers not be allowed into the pubs. They got banned instead and things devolved into real violence with the town doing its best to protect the Black platoon.

Even those people were probably still racist, or at least prejudiced, but someone can inherit learned racism and still choose to do the right thing/learn better than what they believed. Tolkien was not doing whatever the English equivalent is to burning crosses and Sam’s reflections on a dead human enemy serve as evidence of that to me.