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September 24, 2021BruceDayne

The Last Mercury Retrograde of 2021 Is Here, & It’s Coming For Your Relationships

September 24, 2021BruceDayne

Here it is — the final Mercury retrograde of 2021. So far this year, we’ve made it through a mentally exhausting retrograde in Aquarius and a chaotic, gossip-loving retrograde in Gemini. But this time, we might be catching a bit of a break. From September 27 to October 18, the speedy planet will be doing its backwards dance in Libra, a sign known for being peaceful and harmonious — and relationship-oriented.

Libra is ruled by Venus, the Planet of Love and Affection, and as a result our social lives will be the star of this retrograde. This transit “will deepen the need to recalibrate our most important relationships, a theme that was started by the sun’s entrance into Libra,” according to Narayana Montúfar, senior astrologer for Astrology.com. Retrogrades tend to be opportunities to reflect on certain areas of our life. “Since Libra is the sign of one-on-one partnerships, Mercury retrograde will have us revise, review, and rethink how we are relating to one another as a way to find more balance and fairness within our most important bonds,” Montúfar says. During this transit, we’ll be asked to consider how we relate to all of the people in our lives, including romantic partners, friends, family, and even our coworkers, and how we can make our communication more harmonious.

Right when Mercury enters its retrograde, it will be locked in a square with transformative Pluto. “This will expose a lot of existing relationship patterns that are up for renewal,” says Montúfar. “Suddenly, we will feel the need to reshape the way we interpret and communicate information, and therefore, transform how we express our needs with our partners, our bosses, and other important people in our lives.”

For the next month, really take the time to think about how you’ve been communicating with the people in your life. Is it productive? Respectful? Efficient? Also think about how you want to be communicated with. Do you want your boss to give you straight-to-the-point constructive criticism, or would you rather receive feedback packaged in a compliment sandwich? Think on it, and then let them know — but maybe after Mercury stations direct, so your words won’t be misconstrued.

There’s extra incentive to take advantage of this period of reflection, says Lisa Stardust, the author of Saturn Return Survival Guide and The Astrology Deck: Due to this aspect with Pluto and another with the centaur Chiron, “we can expect to experience a lot of healing and transformation around these matters — particularly about exes and frenemies of the past who are resurfacing.”

Of course, this is still a Mercury retrograde, and as such, we should still expect some communication mishaps. From October 5 to October 10, Mercury is going to meet with Mars, which could trigger intense exchanges with our nearest and dearest, according to Montúfar. “We must be careful with what we say, and most importantly, how we say it,” she warns. “When Mars and Mercury meet, words can feel like weapons, and around this time, we could really say something that we, later on, could regret.” Word of advice? Zip it — or, at least, think before you speak. Retrograde or not, that’s always a good idea when communicating with others.

So, how do we prepare for it all? It’s pretty simple and gentle: Take it easy. “Retrograde Mercury is part of the natural cycle of life and it is not anything out of the ordinary as it occurs so often,” says Leslie Hale, psychic astrologer at Keen.com. “Everything serves a purpose and the purpose of a retrograde Mercury is to slow down a bit.”

Madi Murphy, co-founder of The Cosmic RX and The Cosmic Revolution, agrees. “Seriously, slowing down helps avoid so many of the Mercury Retrograde pitfalls. Reading and rereading travel itineraries, leaving extra time for transit, proofreading that proposal and double- or triple-checking all recipients on NSFW Snaps will all majorly pay off,” she says. Murphy also says that this is the time to focus on our “re” words: revisit, redo, reassess, revise, retry, reclaim, re-envision, and retreat.

So, take a breath. We’ve been through, and survived, chaotic, questionable retrogrades before, and this one is no different. We know the basics of what Mercury retrograde does to us — technological mishaps, chaotic travel, brain fog, and misunderstandings. But if we prepare, this transit could just be another bump in the road of a rocky 2021.

“This Mercury retrograde is going to go in like a Real Housewives Reunion show and go out like the end of a SoulCycle class,” says Murphy. “It’s going to start out dramatic, uncomfy, and maybe even a touch snarky in the way it calls you out.” But once we’re on the other side, it’s all going to be worth it. Murphy says we’ll get the clarity we need — even if we have to sweat a little to get there.

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It’s Time For The U.S. To Do Right By Haiti

September 24, 2021BruceDayne

These past few months, Haiti has been in turmoil. After the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7 in Port-Au-Prince, southern Haiti was devastated by an earthquake on August 14. I was just wrapping up a month working on earthquake relief efforts when I saw the latest, horrific news. U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback were photographed using whips to chase down and round up fleeing Haitian refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas.

I was shaken, lost for words. I’ve barely had the time to process the killing of activist, feminist, and friend Netty Duclaire along with approximately 15 other people back on June 30 in a shooting rampage in Port-au-Prince. Between these assassinations, the earthquake that struck my hometown, a hurricane, the spiral of continued gang violence, and political turmoil, the social tensions in Haiti have never stopped.

There is little left to hold on to in Haiti today where insecurity is so high we joke that our life expectancy is 24 hours, renewable each day. I was born and raised in Haiti and I have chosen to stay and put my time, knowledge, and energy to work to advance economic development and social justice. However, this year, for the first time, I realized that to stay alive and earn a decent living, I might have to reconsider my decision. The threats and dire situation in Haiti make it costly, risky, and painful to stay. Fleeing is the safest option for many of us. For those of us who can flee, it only makes sense that some Haitians want a chance to reach the wealthiest country on the continent. That’s why nearly 15,000 Haitian refugees seeking asylum are camped under a Del Rio bridge.

But the world has grown accustomed to disasters and crises in Haiti to the point that no one feels embarrassed to talk about the so-called “Haitian fatigue” — a phenomenon of waning global compassion for our nation. But the lives of more than 10 million people —- people who have dignity, willpower, desire, and dreams —- are at stake. The rich and powerful, who earn a living from exploiting Haiti while occasionally enjoying its natural charm, are allowed to have “Haitian fatigue,” but the idea that the Haitian people who have endured unrelenting violence, political instability, and the absence of opportunities and may need to flee is unfathomable.

It is no surprise, then, that the Biden Administration has continued mass deportations of Haitians seeking asylum from these disasters. At least 16 deportation flights have been scheduled this week alone, even as the images of the U.S. Border Patrol’s violence against Haitians went viral and created an outcry from the public and demands to end Biden’s use of the Trump-era Title 42 immediate deportation policy.

The Haitian refugees under the bridge at Del Rio are a message in a bottle that has finally reached its destination. Haiti is facing a lingering political, economic and social crisis that repeated natural disasters exacerbated. Many Haitians left after the 2010 earthquake. They didn’t trust the government nor the international community to rebuild Haiti. They were right. The reconstruction efforts —- led by former American president Bill Clinton —- failed.

Dispersed in Central and South America in the years since, Haitian refugees fleeing a country destroyed under America’s watch had to pause on the way to gather strength and make money to finance their long journey to US borders, crossing at least eight countries: Chile, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.

And now, this refugee crisis is about America reaping what they’ve sown in Haiti: political interference; 19 years of occupation; 29 years of propping up dictatorships under the Duvalier regime; policies that harm the Haitian agriculture; US interference in the 2010 elections; support to successive puppets and ineffective government; and more recently, ten years of unwavering support to a regime involved in corruption, massacres, human rights abuses and repression that brought Haiti to its knees. When the U.S. so clearly played a role in the destabilization of Haiti and the maintenance of the conditions that have caused us to leave our country, it is amazing for the Biden Administration to reject Haitians’ need for asylum and humane treatment.

Nevertheless, facing this large influx of refugees, the Americans act as shocked as they were in 1980 when more than 2,400 Haitian people landed on Florida shores in six weeks. Haitians were fleeing poverty and oppression at that time. Now, they are fleeing extreme poverty, gang violence, persecution, and humanitarian and political crises. Back in 1980, the US government, which accepted refugees from Cuba and other countries, did not know what to do with those Haitians. Today, as the U.S. accepts refugees from another country they destabilized and destroyed with war, Afghanistan, they still do not seem to know how to properly protect Haitians. Why is it always so difficult to treat Haitian refugees humanely?

Every Haitian should know that they have a home in the beautiful country where they were born. They shouldn’t have to beg for asylum at the US borders and be whipped by border patrol agents as if we were in the days of slavery.

In response to the outcry of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping Haitian refugees, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has announced that agents will no longer use horses in their inhumane rounding-up and deportation of Haitians. And yet the inhumane treatment and deportation of Haitians will apparently continue. The DHS is even advertising its search for a contractor who speaks Haitian Creole to run a migrant facility in Guantanamo Bay. While US Press Secretary Jen Psaki has stated this search for a Haitian Creole-speaking contractor at Gitmo is mere coincidence and would not lead to Haitians at the southern border being sent there, what history has taught us is that, when and wherever possible, the US will fail Haitians.

The US must act now and end these Title 42 deportations and grant asylum to refugees. Expulsion under these conditions is obscene. Haitian asylum seekers deserve safety and assistance, as guaranteed by international laws and basic human rights principles. The United States must seize this opportunity to uphold human rights and dignity.

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The Passing Trailer Highlights That Race Is A Delusion

September 24, 2021BruceDayne

“Race is a delusion,” my friend sighed. We had been discussing passing, the act of someone from one race being accepted or perceived as a member of another, usually a marginalized race to white. After numerous anecdotes about the ridiculous race science-y tactics — gauging the slope of a nose is a popular one — that people employed to categorize others, this was our conclusion.

A week later, our Twitter timelines were scattered with comments on a tantalizing trailer for Passing, a forthcoming Netflix movie based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella of the same name. The film, which will be released on November 10, stars Ruth Negga as Clare and Tessa Thompson as Irene. According to Larson’s original story, both Clare and Irene are supposed to be white-passing.

Still, no matter how good their acting is, Negga and Thompson are not Clare and Irene. They’re not “dark-white” or “olive-skinned” characters on a page onto which we can project our own individual images. They’re flesh and bone people that the public solidly recognizes as Black women. There’s no real chance of delusion because we already feel in the know. Because of that, Twitter debated whether these two women could actually be white-passing. For many, the idea was ridiculous. They pointed out the features of Negga and Thompson’s flesh and bone — their skin, the shape of their noses, the curl of their baby hairs — to say it was impossible that these two women could have passed for white in the 1920s.

Whether Thompson or Negga could pass is irrelevant; the irrelevance is the point of the book and is the very essence of “passing” itself.

Whether Thompson or Negga could pass is irrelevant; the irrelevance is the point of the book and is the very essence of “passing” itself. In my familial and social experience, white-passing Black people are not defined by how white or Black they look. They are defined by how they can, through varied means not at all limited to physical appearance, illuminate the fact that race is a delusion, thereby discomfiting and fascinating others. Those varied means can include the ability to codeswitch, their style aesthetic, the food they eat, and the company they keep. Their features are an important part of that, of course, but nothing is more powerful than the overall delusion.

Identifying who can pass as white is an act of obsession, and while race may be a social construct, obsession is innate. White-passing Black people are a source of anxiety and fascination because they encourage that obsession. When confronted with them, people will go over every detail of their bodies and complexions, the tone of their voice, their family histories, you name it… all with no real result except to highlight the ridiculousness at the core of the concept of race.

Like all social constructs, race is real because we have made it so, and it seems immutable because we wish it to be. It’s no less powerful because humans invented it as a means of control. In fact, that may make it even more powerful. In the name of this deeply silly idea, my people have been plundered and enslaved and tortured, raped, incarcerated, shot, and starved. This deeply silly idea is, in fact, the only reason that my people are my people or why I exist in the first place. Race, although it may be a delusion, is one that has entranced the entire world and changed the course of human history forever.

That’s why, I think, people have such an obsession with white-passing Black people. Larsen embodies this by infusing the novel with Irene’s near-erotic, often violent, and perhaps paranoid preoccupation with Clare. Passing converges all our vices and fears — an unhealthy preoccupation with attaining whiteness and controlling Blackness. It reveals a desire to neatly categorize what we find confusing, and most of all, to expose some big secret, to be the one to pull back the curtains and reveal the county fair magician (the person attempting to pass) for the fraud they are, and through that, how honest and pure we are. Humans love to feel pure, after all.

It also allows us to indulge in race pseudoscience, something which has been clumsily wielded by white people as a means of maintaining their color line and has nonconsensually seeped into the psyches of the rest of us. On the relative ease of passing casually, in the novel Irene thinks “White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot.”

It is silly rot, but race pseudoscience — most notably, phrenology — was used to perpetuate genocide and shape apartheid policies. Silliness makes the room go still when the bodies start to pile up.

What has been lost in the knee-jerk reaction to the film’s trailer is the nuance found in the novel — but within the knee-jerk reaction is also the nuance.

It is the consequence of racism that makes passing such a fraught act and yet such a common one. That’s because there are two different kinds of passing. Historically, white-passing Black people often casually flirted with the color line. In Passing, it is Clare’s act of “passing over” — meaning disappearing almost completely into whiteness on a permanent basis — that is the source of tension and dread, and yet the novel opens with Irene, a proud Black woman with “adherence to her class and race… in the whole pattern of her life,” casually passing so she can get a glass of ice-cold tea in a swanky Chicago location. For Irene and most white-passing Black people of the era, this temporary act of passing was routine. A slight of hand. But Clare’s transgression is, as Irene describes it, “abhorrent.” Clearly, there is a difference between a party trick and a web of deception.

Irene’s disgust at Clare is at the heart of the Twitter debate about both characters’ casting. White people don’t see Clare for who she is, but her own people do. Similarly, we see Thompson and Negga as Black, and can’t imagine them as anything else. When among Black people, Clare doesn’t really pass, nor does she want to pass. Surrounded by white people though, even Irene has a hard time identifying her childhood friend. But that’s the thing about passing. It’s so ridiculous and so dependent on several factors, many of which have nothing to do with the person themselves. It’s more about who they are with or how they are portrayed (it’s interesting to note that director Rebecca Hall’s choice to shoot Passing in black-and-white makes both characters appear whiter).

Standing next to a dark-skinned Black person, a white-passing Black person finds the feat to conceal their true identity almost impossible, while it might be easy in a room full of white people. What has been lost in the knee-jerk reaction to the film’s trailer is the nuance found in the novel — but within the knee-jerk reaction is also the nuance. Because once Irene recognizes Clare, what was to her unmistakably a white woman becomes her sister in race. “Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes!”, Larsen writes. This is not much different than commenting on how Black Negga’s nose appears, or how Thompson is one of us because “look at her.” A shared bond does a lot to shatter the delusion of race, while still enforcing it. Casting two characters that don’t look white just makes us think about this more.

The act of crossing over the supposedly unbreachable rivers of race is meant to be shameful. The shame is amplified more by knowing Black people like Irene are disgusted by the act more than the danger of being found out by white people, who never seem to hold their incognito Black loved one’s entire hearts (consider Stella in Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half, and her detachment from her own daughter, a pattern that Clare repeats with hers). But the thing about Clare is that she has no shame and that’s what turns Passing from a mediocre novel with a “tragic mulatto” trope into almost a thriller, one that asks us real questions instead of continuing banal discourse about “choosing between two worlds.”

No, with Passing, Larsen did something much more powerful. The reactions on Twitter — including complaints about our “cultural fixation” with white-passing people, since in Larsen’s novel, questioning the fixation is the point — only solidified the power of this nearly century-old book. Instead of ruminating on the consequences of passing, Larsen used passing to pull the cloak off the concept of race itself. We, as the readers, are in on the absurdity and performance of it all. When Clare’s racist husband declares there will be “no n*gg*rs in his family,” the room of white-passing women he’s surrounded by fight to stifle their laughter. If the movie does Larsen’s novel justice, which is still to be seen, this debate over whether two light-skinned Black actresses could pass as white will seem as irrational as race pseudoscience. In the book, we witness how these two characters both perform and lie to themselves about race, for survival or love or money or fear. Doing Larsen’s novel justice would also mean questioning the concept of race itself.

As the readers, we’re not asking why Clare chooses one race over the other — the economic benefit makes it quite clear — but we’re asking what the nature of race must be to inspire such obsession, callousness, love, intimacy, and at the same time, such violence and loyalty between Clare and Irene. In the end, Clare’s misadventure in passing has so little to do with whether white people find her out based on how she looks. It has to do with how Black people — including Irene — perceive the core of who she is, beyond appearance and into a deeper place of unfathomable and perhaps terrifying depths. Because if race is a delusion, do any of us really want to know what it’s concealing?