Daniel José Older continues his campaign to replace Lovecraft with Butler for the World Fantasy Award:
“Why Butler?” people asked me when the petition went up, and I remembered how entrenched we all get in our own corners within the genre. Butler’s prose soars where Lovecraft’s stumbles. Her characters live and breathe, confront complexities of power and privilege amid fantastical, terrifying dreamscapes steeped in history and nuance. My SFF community is mostly black and brown, and Butler inspired many of us to start writing in the first place. These folks congregate more often than not in online communities like the Nerds of Color, Black Girl Nerds and the Fan Bros, because outside of ComicCon, SFF cons have historically not been safe spaces for women and people of color. These are the online communities that signed the petition in the thousands, which is what transformed it from being just another attempt at dethroning Lovecraft as the face of one of fantasy’s highest awards (there have been several) to a global conversation with coverage in Salon, the Guardian, NPR and countless blogs.
I still think Older is wrong to diss Lovecraft’s writing talent. It distracts from the real argument and puts hackles up that don’t need to. But what I am coming round to is the idea of replacing Lovecraft with Butler, even if her work isn’t quite the first thing you think of as fantasy. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t the perfect fit for the World Fantasy Award; it’s the symbolism of replacing of replacing a dead white racist man with a dead black woman. It’s not enough just to make the WFA over into a neutral award like the Nebulas because that would still leave most of the major sf awards named after dead white men and even dead white racist men, as is the case with the two Campbell awards. Putting Butler forward as the face of one of the major fantastika awards would send a signal that science fiction and fantasy have changed, are trying to shed their racist history.