Should the WFA use Butler instead of Lovecraft?

I understand the impulse behind this petition, but I don’t understand the need to replace H. P. Lovecraft with Octavia Butler:

Octavia Butler contributed a rich, nuanced, complex body of work during her lifetime. Her novels, essays and short stories changed the entire genre of speculative fiction by complicating our notions of power, race and gender. Her characters were vivid and deeply human and her prose was sharp. She wrote masterfully across the imaginative genres, from science fiction to historical fantasy to horror.

While HP Lovecraft, whose head the current award is modeled after, did leave a lasting mark on speculative fiction, he was also an avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith. Many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinions, most notably Nnedi Okorafor. It’s time to stop co-signing his bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past.

What strikes me here, as it did Nick Mamatas, who spent some time refuting it, is the gratitious dig at Lovecraft’s writing, which is irrelevant to the purpose of the petition. That Lovecraft was a racist and that his racism was often integral to his stories should be enough; his writing qualities do not enter into it.

It also strikes me as odd to propose Octavia Butler as a replacement. She was a science fiction writer, not a fantasy writer. Just because she’s about the only deceased, prominent black science fiction or fantasy writer people actually know doesn’t make her suitable as figurehead for this particular award. It’s not as if science fiction has no awards named after horrible racists that could do with a bit of a cleanup, frex both the Campbell awards, named after an editior whose racism shaped science fiction far more and for far longer than Lovecraft’s ever did.