Yes, this took me FOREVER to get to and I definitely intended to sooner and also ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Jemisin's a genius, we all know that, and her short stories are laser focused in a way that even her fiction sometimes isn't.
She's interested in kindness and cruelty, in the dynamics of power and, more than anything else, in fighting what needs being fought. She asks VERY different questions (and thus finds very different answers) about human nature than Butler does (and, yes, I know, cliched to compare the two and also there are reasons that the preeminent Black SFF writer of the 20th century and of the 21st century are in conversation on matters of bodily autonomy and what it means to be taken), but her stories, starting from the absolute first one which lays this out explicitly, is that the paradox of tolerance is not a paradox, but a necessary precondition to existence. If you are prejudiced, hateful, unwilling to care for others, you are not welcome in society and you are the thing that needs to be brought down.
If Butler is almost always asking whether human beings *can* ever be better—and what would be necessary to make that happen—Jemisin refuses to believe they can't and asks instead who we are going to be when we are better. What does it look like to show up?