By Anna Gibson

One of the most unsettling trends I’ve seen in mass media is the continual misrepresentation and outright erasure of black people. The history of misrepresentation is long. As late as the late 1800s ,”plantation narrative” novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, romanticize the notion of slavery, framing the slave master as a sympathetic hero. In the 1920s, Sambo was considered the buffoon with a wide ready grin and wide eyes, eager to please white men deemed superior to him. More recently, we’ve seen the stereotypical Angry Black Women in movies and shows like Empire and Madea.

And Science Fiction and Fantasy genre (hereafter called SF/F) are no exceptions.

The racism in SF/F isn’t always explicit; it’s usually subtle. An example of this occurs in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. The entire series is conspicuously absent of black people, except for the villains. Throughout the…