I'm sure that the language in the books had more than just hints of racism. Look at when it was written. I won't put Tolkien on any sort of PC Pedestal. He created a marvelous fantasy world, and was a brilliant linguist, but he was no saint.

But yeah, they could have removed some of the old-fashioned attitudes without diminishing the spirit of the story itself.

As for the actors playing the Uruk-hai... I mostly saw a metric fuck-ton of makeup. I actually was thinking of them the same way that I'd see an alien on Star Trek and see the alien species, not a human ethnicity. I get lost in the makeup, costumes, and the fiction when I'm watching a movie. I admit that this is a fail on my part - I didn't even recognize how they'd cast the actors for the Orcs. I just saw makeup and prosthetics. I should have been more aware.