There are elves of color in forgotten realms, you had the drow that was suppose to be obsidian black, you had sun elves that had golden looking skin, wood elves with copper skin etc. I prefer elves having non-human skin colors vs humans with pointy ears.

I think they even added some brown looking ones to appease black people, they even went way overboard with having them have dreads , this was the correct way to introduce diversity back when people cared about the original material and wanted to build on it rather then destroy it. It was still kind of goofy and silly but was fine in my book.