Occasionally The Root will interrupt our coverage of black news, opinions, politics, and culture to openly address our white readership. In 2020, we’d like to finally have that oft-discussed “conversation about race” we hear you guys mention so often. To be clear, white people need to have a conversation about race. Black people in America have been actively engaged in an ongoing discussion about race since 1619, when twenty & odd negroes stepped onto the shores of Virginia, looked around and asked furtively in their native tongue:

Jeannette Ng, who won the prize this year, said the man it was named after “set the tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre.”

Note: I write a monthly column for the Czech SF/F magazine XB-1. The magazine's October 2016 issue is a special horror-themed edition and I was asked to write about the problematic heritage of H. P. Lovecraft. Which I did. The column caused a bit of controversy when it was published, with a