Regarding Steven Forrest

An Open Letter to the Astrological Community

Hello,

I’ve been watching what has happened around Steven Forrest, and I think I finally understand why it has bothered me as much as it has. Why it’s caused me to wade into the controversy and fight in the digital streets with my song and my responses.

This is my mirror. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I know there are people who heard Steven’s conversation and were genuinely hurt or offended by what he said. I’m not interested in telling those people that they shouldn’t have been. People have their own histories, experiences, boundaries, and relationships to race in America. I also understand why organizations felt compelled to respond. Institutions have constituencies, values, reputations, and responsibilities of their own. Even with this being said, I find it hard to believe that most people felt more than a few moments of emotional deregulation based on Steven’s unguarded words with Ricky Williams on a podcast.

So let’s name the harm. It was a moment of possible surprise and emotional pain as a trauma response that was triggered by hearing a prominent white Astrologer say the worst slur in America. The N-word for my international audience. Steven didn’t say it in anger, but as an expression of how the past used to be in a conversation about race and shadow-work with a black man that he was deep friends with. Ricky Williams was not offended, so the offense was borrowed. Some just wanted to express their hurt, and some saw an opportunity to enforce a boundary.

But for me personally watching what happened after that conversation is what drove me to act. I saw a few think pieces where people enforced this boundary publicly, some were decent, but if we’re honest with ourselves, most were moral posturing. Definitely the precipitous reaction of the UAC was moral posturing of a sort. A brave and useful organization would have maybe taken a few more days to fold to the mob. For me the orgs piling on was when I jumped in.

Steven had an unguarded conversation with a good friend about race in America. If we’re actually about healing the racial divide and polarization, you’d think this might be a good thing. It was public. He said things that other people found objectionable, even though the person actually sitting across from him did not appear to experience the conversation in the same way. People can be upset at Steven. People can criticize Steven. Not even octogenarian Capricorns are above reproach. But the context matters to me personally, I took it personally and wrote a song and published it that Stephen later shared.

I’m not particularly nice, and I’m a bit more transgressive than progressive. I like a good battle, especially for people getting their entire life’s work devalued and I have this really old-fashioned respect for my elders thing that I haven’t been able to shake. I talk shit about the Pluto in Leo generation sometimes, but there’s love in it. I was raised by that generation.

I suspect Steven will never speak that unguardedly about race in public again. Mission accomplished. Good work everyone.

If the purpose of the response was to establish a moral boundary, then the boundary has been established. Loudly. Clearly. Permanently.

But what happens after the boundary has been established?

That is the question I keep coming back to, because I watched people demand “consequences” without always being particularly clear about what those consequences should be, how long they should last, or what Steven could possibly do to satisfy them. I watched organizations distance themselves. I watched astrologers produce commentary and share it everywhere they could. I watched people demonstrate their own moral positioning in relation to him. Some of it was thoughtful. Some of it felt necessary. Some of it, to me, looked like the ancient human pleasure of watching someone fall while assuring ourselves that our participation in the spectacle was righteous.

That bothers me. That gets my Mars going. Once my Mars in Scorpio gets going it tends to remain going until satisfaction. Some find this entertaining, some find it horrifying.

It also forced me to confront something else that I think has been simmering beneath the surface of contemporary astrology for a long time. There are people who are quietly tired of the assumption that progressive politics owns astrology, that one particular political culture gets to establish the moral vocabulary of the entire field, and that disagreement with that culture necessarily reveals some defect of character.

I don’t believe any race owns astrology. I don’t believe any political party owns astrology. I don’t believe conservatives own it, liberals own it, progressives own it, socialists own it, libertarians own it, or whatever political tribe comes next owns it.

Astrology is older than all of them.

It has passed through empires, religions, revolutions, languages, political systems, philosophical schools, and civilizations. It has been practiced by people whose assumptions about the world would be completely alien to every political faction currently arguing on social media. I find the idea that our particular moment in history has finally discovered the correct ideological framework through which everyone practicing astrology must understand humanity extraordinarily difficult to believe.

That does not mean politics should be absent from astrology. My own astrology is deeply concerned with power. I care about who possesses it, who is excluded from it, how institutions wield it, how groups enforce conformity, and what happens to individuals when collective structures decide what is acceptable.

Which is precisely why I am uncomfortable now.

Power does not stop being power because I might agree with the people exercising it.

Social punishment does not cease being social punishment because its stated purpose is justice. Institutions do not become incapable of cowardice because they have adopted the correct language. Groups do not become immune to projection because they believe themselves to be protecting vulnerable people. Human beings remain human beings, especially when we gather together and become convinced of our own righteousness. Mob mentality or herd mentality is in all of us to some extent, but I think my Uranian Moon conjunction makes me very reactive to it.

Astrologers, of all people, should understand these patterns.

The good astrologers spend much of their lives talking about patterns and shadow material. Personal and collective.

We talk about Pluto. We talk about projection. We talk about Saturn and judgment. We talk about Neptune and collective enchantment. We talk about the unconscious, the rejected self, the parts of ourselves we cannot tolerate and therefore discover everywhere outside ourselves.

Then someone becomes socially radioactive and suddenly everyone is remarkably certain where the shadow lives.

Over there.

In him.

That is where this becomes my mirror.

Because I have to ask myself what I am doing too. Maybe my irritation with outrage culture has its own shadow. Maybe my instinct to defend someone being surrounded comes partly from my own relationship with authority. I do take pride in my willingness to stand outside the consensus. I enjoy being the person willing to say the impolite thing. Maybe some of what I am seeing in other people belongs to me.

I have to allow that possibility if I am going to ask anyone else to examine themselves.

But after looking into that mirror, I still arrive at the same place.

I do not want an astrology in which making a serious mistake means permanent contamination. I do not want an astrology governed by fear of saying the wrong thing. I do not want astrologers constantly checking the political temperature of the room before speaking honestly. I especially do not want a culture where “accountability” becomes a word we use when what we actually mean is exclusion, humiliation, professional isolation, or indefinite punishment.

Accountability has to contain the possibility of repair, or just be honest and call it punishment.

The organizations and individuals who responded to Steven were exercising their own judgment, and they had every right to do so. But they were also being observed. Their choices communicated something about the kind of astrological culture they want to create. Some people saw courage and solidarity in those choices.

Others saw something very different.

Those people count too.

Because there are consequences to enforcing consequences. Trust can move in both directions. Institutions can lose legitimacy while attempting to demonstrate it. A community can enforce its boundaries so aggressively that people who never crossed those boundaries begin quietly wondering whether they still want to belong to the community enforcing them.

That may already be happening.

I don’t know Steven personally. I cannot look inside him and determine precisely what he believes, what he regrets, what he has learned, or what he should have said differently. I can only look at what happened and decide what it reveals to me.

And what it revealed was not simply something about Steven Forrest.

It revealed something about us.

It revealed something about power, belonging, ideological conformity, forgiveness, fear, status, institutions, and the extraordinary human temptation to locate evil safely outside ourselves.

That includes me.

So this is my mirror.

I am willing to look into it.

I just think the rest of us should be willing to look into ours.