[stubish]

Nothing is racist about inventing a fantasy race in a fantasy world. One of the reasons we have fantasy and science fiction is it allows us to discuss difficult real world topics in a setting that hopefully avoids the real world biases.

I think what people find racist about this situation is that the scenario is obviously mirroring black slavery (fine, it still needs to be discussed), and that the race the authors chose to stand in for blacks are a racial caricature of blacks (monkeys, real world racist dehumanization as used by real world white supremacists and real world history, generally considered sub-human). End result is you get to discuss slavery and racism of sub-humans, which probably isn't what the creators intended, but the sort of thing we got wrong in the 90s. And probably should be fixed in updates like this if you want to keep your IP and franchise alive and not join the masses of media that 'hasn't aged well'.