100% Agree. This is a non-issue. Drow elves are make believe fantasy creatures that are meant to be mythological, metaphorical representations of aspects of human nature. All individuals are capable of descending into a state of degenerate evil, and Drow are a fictional expression of this.

No Drow were harmed by the writings of Gary Gygax.

Just to nitpick...most of the Field Folio monsters were made by British contributors to the White Dwarf magazine's "Creature Feature" articles, but they also included some monsters that had appeared elsewhere, which included Gygax's drow. Gygax got a royalty every time he contributed to a book, so he made sure to have some of his material was added to a mostly British monster book.

To clarify, Drow were introduced in 1978 in the game adventure G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. In 1981, the second monster manual, called "The Fiend Folio", included them so they could be used as monsters (not player characters) by DMs who bought the book.

The Drow are not African. Around 1989-1990, as a nod to demands for representation from the first wave of political correctness that has started back then, a D&D artist painted Drow as black women in ONE PAINTING for the cover of a Drow game book. At the same time, a series of D&D computer games were being published by SSI (the Gold Box games), where they took existing D&D book covers, and reused them for their game box covers. What you're showing as "proof", is a cover to a IP tie-in videogame, re-using a one-time only politically correct cover that does not accurately represent what Drow are in D&D. That's why the pic says "SSI" at the bottom!

Also, the ENWorld forums are notorious for being biased, PC, where they routinely trash talk Gary Gygax. They are a lousy source of information. As a journalist, why not reach out to his son, Luke Gygax, or any of the surviving of TSR who worked on the books?

So yes, poorly researched, click-bait.

The reason the Drow look the way they do, is obvious with even a cursory look at the lore.

So why do they look the way they look? They've sold their souls to a Chaos Demon, Lolth (whose primary aspect is a giant Black Widow Spider), and have mutated to look like her. They have skin the color of black chitin, cobweb colored hair, and wear red-accented clothing mimicking the red hourglass on the underside of the spider. Black Widows eat their male mates, which is why they're an evil matriarchy.

Lore-wise, the Drow are an amalgam of three things: Tolkien described "Dark Elves" as Elves who never left Middle Earth, and never saw the light of the silmarils (hence "Dark"). The Elric series features Anti-Elves in the form of Melniboneans, sorcerers who make deals with Chaos Demons to ride dragons and conquer the world. Elric himself is an albino Melnibonean. Margaret St. Clair was a feminist Wiccan psychedelic author from San Francisco. She wrote "The Shadow People" (cited by the "misogynistic" Gygax as inspirational reading in the 1st Ed DMG's Appendix N), in which the evil "Green Elves" are sending their orc and ettin servants to kidnap people in modern day SF and taking them into the "underearth" to a giant Vault full of mushroom forests where they enslave (and sometimes eat) captive humans. Mix all three of these and you get the Drow from D&D.

Arguably, Gygax also made the Drow black with white hair, to distinguish them from Elric, because TSR had an IP issue with Chaosium over publishing the Melniboneans in their Dieties and Demigods book -- this way no one would assume TSR was infringing on Chaosium's licensing.