Here's an interesting online article about Star Trek:

Space-racism is bad: And 17 other not-so-subtle lessons learned from Star Trek
By Josh Modell, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, And Zack Handlen May 4, 2009

http://www.avclub.com/articles/spaceracism-is-bad-and-17-other-notsosubtle-lesson,27462/

Here's the first paragraph of that article:

1. Racism is bad (original series, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield")
Star Trek has a long-running habit of recasting social situations via none-too-subtle metaphors, using far-future scenarios packed with androids and aliens to highlight some of the flaws in stodgy old 20th-century human thinking. One of the most pointed such shots at social commentary came in the 1969 original-series episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," as Captain James T. Kirk and the Starship Enterprise ran across two powerful half-white, half-black aliens with a long cultural history of mutual suspicion, oppression, and hatred that led to their world's destruction; in the end, they were the only survivors. Why so much hate? As one explained, he was white on the left side and black on the right side, whereas his enemy was the opposite. Of course, Kirk and his (nearly all white) crew didn't get it; to their advanced civilization, the distinction between skin colors and the prejudice attached to those colors was arbitrary, ridiculous, and hopelessly backward. Hint hint, racism-plagued '60s America.

-snip-

Here's the link to a YouTube video of that classic Star Trek (The Original Series TOS) episode entitled
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi7QQ5pO7_A&feature=player_embedded Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"

And here's a reader's comment about that episode:

The 'white on one side, black on the other 'was used to exemplify the inconsequential difference between Commissioner Biel and Loki. His insistence that black "on the right side" was inherently superior to those who were white on the right side is entire basis for his argument.

His stated beliefs are clearly absurd and serve to illustrate to 1960s audiences which other prejudices of their own might also be fallacious.

Don't forget the time that this story was written.
-sunnchilde (3 months ago)