I mean, I knew Howard (the author) was racist going in, but I didn't think it'd show this blatantly in the story.
Oh hells yeah, Howard was racist. If you think those first couple stories are bad, just wait until you get to any of the ones set in the far southern Black Kingdoms (south of Stygia, the land where swarthy big-nosed people worship evil snake gods in giant pyramids).
Howard was doing the 'alternate earth history' thing with those stories, and he had some odd ideas about how humans progressed and regressed. He wrote a brief historical overview somewhere about the history of his world pre-Conan, and it's full of various groups of humans developing cultures and civilizations and then being torn apart by wars or other events and devolving back into apes - for example, early groups of humans who moved further and further north, becoming more warlike in the harsh arctic environment and eventually devolving into a species of aggressive heavy-furred ape. And the more advanced and civilized his humans are, the whiter they are. *shrug*
It's worth noting that Conan himself is from Cimmeria, a gloomy land full of uncivilized and rather violent people, so Howard wasn't necessarily praising high culture and order as the best thing, but damned if he didn't like writing darker folks as evil half-human half-ape monstrosities.