Across a year, we’re graced with twelve or so full moons, each adorned with their own glittering jewels of indigenous and eco-derived titles. The Old Farmer’s Almanac tells us that in April, we can feel free to gaze into the moon-rising night and call that golden orb pink, named for the early blooms of creeping phlox. The Pink Moon tends to occur in Libra (like it did last Saturday), although every so often she’ll bare her gifts in Scorpio.
I can’t help but to think about color a lot recently, mostly with respect to our girl V. That Venus, ruler of Libra and Taurus, holds domain over the colors white and green- feels good, feels right. She has her own special ties to purple1, as well as pastels at large; she rules over copper, the metal, which blooms green against the touch of air-flesh; but what of pink, which extends beyond pastels, coming loud in shades of sharp and blister and Barbie and spice? And why white, exactly? Why green?
The way I and a good deal of other smarties see it, the color white very much articulates a cerebral, Libran Venus, where green speaks to her earthbound Taurus manifestation.2
As an artist, when I think of the color white, I am reminded of the myth of impartiality, of not having a point of view. Against our cultural backdrop, white appears to be unsullied by perspective and other intensely human conventions. White provides the common canvas of choice: she invokes Tabula Rasa. Purity. Virginhood. It is difficult for me to divorce these ideas from social conceptions of whiteness, which among plenty things functionally declares itself as default, relegating all outside its pale parameters to Other, or even to take it a step further: dirty or tainted. A splash of Other against white is considered a corruption until spun into gold and decided upon as Art. White is a lot more complicated than it or the world would have us believe; in its perceived lack, it invites projection by way of meaning making and vice versa.
For me, Libra is very much a sign about ideals and the aspiration toward them. As an air sign, Libra is very much concerned with theoretical conceits, its cardinal nature egging onward toward endless pursuits like “balance,” without necessarily believing in definitive practical application. At any given time, there is too much to consider; ideals do not translate to worldly dimensions.
Whiteness isn’t real in the way that things in our tangible world are, but rather, it’s a conceptual value that can and has been granted and taken over time. In the first scene of Atlanta's Season 3 premiere, a comical (to me) interaction takes place between a couple of fellas fishing under a bridge in the night; the white guy regales his black partner with a haunted tale: years ago, an affluent black town was flooded out by the U.S. government, the very waters this duo eerily floats along. With a particularly ludicrous gravitas, he says of the town’s inhabitants,
“They were almost white. White’s not a real thing, you know? People just… become white. [...] They thought they were safe, they’d paid to be white. With enough blood and money anyone can be white.”
Whiteness itself isn’t fixed, it’s aspirational—a term I am unable to encounter without also recalling Academy Award winner (and prototypical Libra) Gwyneth Paltrow’s iconic words to some Harvard Business School students a few years back, “It is crucial to me that we remain aspirational.”3 Dear Gwynnie was referring to her luxury lifestyle banner Goop, however her words (which I gleefully take out of context with frequency) easily translate and speak to the functions and mechanisms of whiteness. Not only is whiteness aspirational, one can never have enough of it. It is a fight to maintain, as its existence and worth is entirely predicated on dogged exclusion. In Michael Oliver’s James Baldwin and the “Lie of Whiteness,” he writes “If and when a (white) psychology is propped up by a notion of false superiority, funded by a lie of (black) inferiority, then what would happen to this (white) self-understanding if the lie is revealed as false? Again, [James] Baldwin puts it perfectly: ‘I am not what you said I was. And if my place, as it turns out, is not my place, then you are not what you said you were, and where’s your place? (Baldwin 2010e, p. 72)’”4
As my colleague Diana Rose Harper would say, “Everything is relationships”5—an extremely Venusian notion. Whiteness sprang forth most clearly in the 17th century as a retroactive logic for the proliferation of slavery, hinging itself on the polarity of good verses evil. For black to be bad, white must be good. Robert P. Baird wrote on this extensively in an article for The Guardian last year, saying “[white identity] had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.”6 While the beauty of the white archetype lies in its open-endedness, we find its hazards in the same place. For who has filled in the blanks on our behalf and declared them as law—divine law?
In a world so aggressively shaped by white Christian antebellum principles7, we cannot escape the baggage placed on a white that claims to have no point of view or context of its own. If everything is relationships, white cannot be examined by its lonesome as it must have a context; our personal understandings of color cannot be untouched by the racialization of hues at large. “The rhetorical force of attributing the curse [of blackness] to biblical and divine authority is unmistakable. For if the basis for the claim is social, then it is open to revision. However, if the basis is divinely authorized, then the inferior status of the racialized subject is forever fixed and cannot be changed. In this way, blackness is forever cursed, while whiteness becomes eternally blessed” (Park, 15-16). We learn from young that fairness is about justice is about goodness is about whiteness is also about beauty; to be fair is to command authority on what is true (Saturn’s exaltation in Libra says hello). Fairness then, when used to illustrate appearance, now becomes a euphemism for “white and therefore beautiful.” Mirror Mirror on the whatever, who’s the whitest, most goodest, most perfect specimen of God’s light? Most of us don’t unlearn this. White in its blankness beckons perspective while also claiming it as antithetical to its being. Divinity transcends perspective.
In W.E.B. DuBois’ 1920 essay The Souls of White Folk, he put forth: “This theory of human culture and its aims has worked itself through warp and woof of our daily thought with a thoroughness that few realize. Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is ‘white’; everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is ‘'yellow’; a bad taste is ‘brown’; and the devil is ‘black.’”8
I say this a lot, but I am far less interested in reframing pain points toward positivity so much as I am simply invested in critically examining idealistic structures presented as absolute. None of us are capable of being totally objective, each of us shaped by our experiences, exposure, indoctrinations, cultural allegiances, and more. I believe Libra is hyper-aware of this. This is a good thing—we should honor that we are not robots, cannot feasibly pass as one. This also makes justice a fool’s errand, for at least from a white lens, ironically, there will never be one true truth.
While white intimates and raises questions of what purity can be, allowing us to discern judgment as well as subscribe to pre-existing cultural notions, green I believe tells us where we can already find purity thriving.
I spent my 4/20 evening this past week ushering in Taurus season with a couple of badass Leos—Pao Rodelas and Mack the Zodiac—for a cabaret themed astrology night produced by the good pal Mercurius George. I did most of my prep on my way to the venue, jotting down my Taurus thoughts in Notes while making sure to appreciate a view in flux. I caught life bursting and my thesis emerged with the same thunder: confirmation of life. The fecundity that Taurus ushers in, at least in this northern hemisphere, demands attention to creation. “April showers bring May flowers” is a Venusian exercise in life affirming showmanship. What pray tell, is more “pure” than that?
Would you believe that I set out to write about pink and simply became distracted? To close, I’d like to draw our attention back to last week’s Pink Moon, as it was our last full moon before we found ourselves zapped to the current eclipse season. She was ruled by an exalted Venus in Pisces who will take reign again this weekend for the lunar eclipse in Taurus (while conjunct Jupiter at the exaltation degree, aaaahh!)—I posit that Venus, supported in Jupiter’s purple Piscean waters, gets to be pretty in pink here. An exalted Venus gets to divest from ideas of who its supposed to be, divest from any ideas at all. Venus gets to show up and allow that to be enough. She gets to vibe and be slutty and live free and bold. She gets to decide her colors and make them from scratch, as authentic or artificial as the mood requires. She deserves that freedom. She deserves that whimsy. She deserves her own terms.
With the moon recently moved into the Pisces party this morning, I leave y’all with these fiery pink words: “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” — Toni Morrison, Pisces moon.
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