I had a bit like this once, though not quite to this level. I had a world where Gnomes lived in caravan groups like Romani, and there was a lot of racism against them. I thought my players would sympathize, but what actually happened was "let's not rock the boat".

It's not terribly surprising depending on how you present it. Lots of hate groups have public opinions that are at least somewhat popular among the masses. It's really hard to recruit if you can't establish some common ground. You don't lead with showing new people the baby killing tree.

In this video, doesn't Taliesin Jaffe misses the table, and they laugh at him?

op adding subliminal layers to the meme. 😅

In D&D, they're just objectively right. Older editions had certain races as being inherently evil. Even now, there's differences in intelligence between races.

I don't see a problem to be honest, although only if the players are experts in really be in character