When you hear the word jungle, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? If you said “white people in charge,” you're probably a racist. That said, white people have overcome some pretty astounding odds to become kings and queens and lords and princesses of a place they had no business being in the first place.…

This is The Geography of Hate – a cartographical collection of every geotagged tweet in the continental U.S. between June 2012 and April 2013 in which the word "chink," "gook," "nigger," "wetback," "spic," "dyke" "fag," "homo," "queer" or "cripple" was used in an explicitly negative way.

Most of us look back on the cartoons of our youth through the lens of nostalgia, but man, M.A.S.K. was horrible. I mean, just awful. It made G.I. Joe look smart, and it made He-Man look deep. And, as it turns out, it could be super, super racist, too.

In 1984, NASA physicist Ronald E. McNair became the second African-American man to fly in space. Tragically, McNair died just two years later in the Challenger disaster. With the help of StoryCorps, McNair's brother Carl pays tribute to McNair with this uplifting story of a young Ronald McNair trying to borrow books …

Science fiction pioneer and futurist Hugo Gernsback was a man who dared to dream big. And making big predictions meant that he was going to whiff huge every now and again.

Recently, an article over at Salon tackled the portrayal of race in Game of Thrones and the racial legacy of J.R.R.Tolkien. Now, Tor.com's Mordicai Knode notes that another high-fantasy favorite, Dungeons & Dragons, has its own racial issue, namely Eurocentric homogeny. And it's time for that to change.

Over at Salon, fantasy writer Saladin Ahmed has a terrific essay about race in fantasy epics, focusing especially on Game of Thrones and its relationship to JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle. His main question is really whether George RR Martin's contemporary tale is any better than Tolkein's tale at dealing with…

Over at the Straight Dope messageboard, there's a fascinating conversation about the perils of reading old books, especially science fiction novels, in which some very off-kilter racism is tossed out casually. The discussion kicks off with Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons," in which the main character just randomly …

All along, Alcatraz has felt like two very different shows — you've got the horrifying, brutal and often creeptastic flashbacks to late-Eisenhower prison madness. And then you've got the cozy present-day police procedural, with lingering mysteries. Last night, the balance tipped sharply towards the creepy brutality…

Here are some snapshots from a dark chapter in American history. Throughout the 19th century, San Francisco's growing Chinese immigrant population had to contend with codified prejudice from legislation like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, segregated communities, and the sentiment that Chinese-Americans were the source …