What Do We Do with the Contradictions?
Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, and I found myself researching the history behind it. I came across the story of All Snakes Day—the legend that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland. But of course, there were never actual snakes. The story is often interpreted as a metaphor for the expulsion of pagans, Druids, and indigenous spiritual traditions. It’s a story of forced displacement and erasure, of one group deciding that another should no longer exist in their space.
It hit home because my ancestors were among the displaced. My family is from Ireland and Germany, places where people were driven from their homelands for reasons that were political, religious, or economic. And yet, in America, those same Irish and German immigrants, once scorned as outsiders, eventually became part of the dominant class—assimilating into whiteness and, in many cases, becoming enforcers of the very systems of exclusion that once marginalized them.
It’s an old pattern: Who gets to stay, and who must be driven out? Who gets to define belonging?
Octavia Butler’s Kindred plays with this same question in a literal way. Dana, a Black woman from the 1970s, is forcibly pulled into the antebellum South, where her survival depends on understanding how history shaped the present. She doesn’t get to stand outside of history—she is in it, whether she wants to be or not. Butler doesn’t let her escape history. It scars her. It leaves her permanently altered—because no one touches history without being touched back.
That’s what keeps coming back to me as I reflect on Danny O’Neal’s words. Danny, one of the first Black students to integrate Gordon Military High School, reflected on how white students had to first see Black students as human before they could accept them. Not as classmates, not as peers—just as human. That process of recognition wasn’t automatic. It wasn’t immediate. It had to be earned, as though Black students had to prove their worth before being granted the basic dignity of existence in that space.
They had to see us as human first.
Danny wasn’t condemning his classmates when he said it. He was giving them grace—acknowledging that they were just children too, acting as they had been taught, raised to accept a reality that made sense to them. But that reality had rules about who belonged and who didn’t, who was fully human and who was not. And that’s the real question, the one that repeats across history: What gives one group of people the right to decide who is human and what is acceptable?
Christianity, Segregation, and the Shifting Justifications for Exclusion
This isn’t just an abstract question for me. I teach psychology, counseling, and human services at a Christian college, where I see these dynamics play out in real-time. More than a few of my students espouse Christian nationalist ideas in class discussion boards, often without realizing the weight of what they’re saying. They echo beliefs that define certain people—immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, racial minorities—as threats to “Christian values” or American identity.
The impact isn’t theoretical. These ideas have the potential to marginalize and dehumanize others in the room. And yet, at the same time, I know local pastors who truly strive to embody love, grace, and welcome. The contrast is stark. It’s disorienting. It’s frustrating. Because while I know Christianity is not inherently oppressive, I also know that its loudest institutional voices—the ones that dominate the airwaves, shape policy, and control the narrative—have long been gatekeepers of who is and isn’t fully human.
It’s the same justification that was used for slavery. The same justification that allowed white pastors to preach love on Sunday and support segregation on Monday. The same justification that now fuels the Christian nationalist panic about a “decline in family values”—as if the oppression of others was ever a moral necessity for maintaining those values in the first place.
The Patternists, the Mutes, and the Missionaries in Survivor
Octavia Butler explores this theme across her works. In the Patternist series, the telepathic Patternists dominate and enslave non-telepathic humans, whom they call Mutes—a name that strips them of identity, reducing them to their supposed inferiority. The Mutes aren’t seen as people, despite their intelligence, emotions, and history. They are laborers, tools, less than.
In Survivor, the same dynamic unfolds when human missionaries arrive on an alien planet and refuse to recognize the Kohn as equals. Despite the Kohn’s clear intelligence, their deep societal structure, and their long history, the missionaries still view them as other—as beings to be controlled, converted, or avoided. The missionaries claim moral and spiritual superiority, but in the end, they become the ones who are enslaved—trapped by their own addiction to meklah, a substance they didn’t even realize they needed to resist. They didn’t know they were addicted until the Garkhon removed it as a form of punishment and control. They could choose to break the addiction, but doing so was dangerous and required a significant will to live.
Butler forces us to ask: Who is truly human in these dynamics? Who gets to decide? And once that decision is made, how hard is it to undo?
Desegregation, Kindred, and Today: The Same Story, Different Names
Danny’s words won’t leave me. They had to see us as human first.
Desegregation wasn’t just about changing school policies. It was about forcing people to confront the reality of others’ humanity—a reality that had been systematically denied. White students at Gordon Military High had to unlearn what they had been taught about who belonged, who mattered, who was fully human. It was a painful, disorienting process, but it had to happen. And it didn’t happen all at once.
That same dynamic plays out in Kindred, where Dana, despite knowing history, still struggles to survive in a world that refuses to see her as fully human. Butler doesn’t let her, or us, look away.
And now, today, we watch the same cycle repeat in different forms. Who is waiting to be seen as human?
Immigrants at the border, whose dignity is reduced to numbers and policy debates.
Trans youth, whose very existence is framed as a threat.
Women seeking autonomy, demonized for wanting control over their own bodies.
The language has changed, but the power dynamic remains the same. Those who have long controlled the definitions of morality, decency, and humanity still hold onto their role as gatekeepers. And just like in Kindred and Survivor, many of them don’t even realize how deeply entrenched they’ve become in the very system they claim to resist. They believe they are saving society—but in reality, they are bound by their own fear of change, their own addiction to control.
History Rhymes—But Can We Break the Pattern?
The stories I’ve worked on in these oral histories aren’t just records of the past. They are roadmaps for navigating today. The same questions that haunted Danny and Carilyn aren’t really questions of whether someone will be granted humanity. They are questions about who gets to decide in the first place.
And maybe, just maybe, by recognizing the patterns, we can finally break the cycle.
