Ken Scott Baron Podcast

As I read Cross’s book, “All White People live in Racism.” This seemed uncomfortable to me as a white person, but I grew up in the UK where the perception is that the Brits are liberal. However, the country has emerged from a colonial past but racism is evident there.

In Johnson’s book, he attended a Catholic school initially and history was taught from a revisionist perspective, and Johnson even took part in pageantry glorifying the heroes of the revolution who often were slave owners. As Cross points out, race is an evolving social idea crated to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage.

I emigrated to the US in 1971 as a 25 year old and 14 years before Johnson was born, my knowledge of US history was minimal. I was “bathed” in the students of the University of California’s anti war and the peace movement and began my career in science in (partial} understanding of the colorism of US history.

Johnson, years later as he changed to a Black school, undergoes the transformation from this whitewashing to an honest reckoning of his Black History.

The Eurocentric view of white privilege is all pervasive, whether you are white, Black or Brown.

Coming Out

Coming out” is the personal process of a person accepting and openly sharing their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity (LGBTQ+) with others, a journey unique to everyone, involving self-discovery and gradual disclosure.

This can be liberating but also challenging, with no single right way to do it, and it’s a continuous process, not a one-time event, requiring self-readiness and consideration for personal safety. We opt in and out of events in our life, sometimes easily as in wearing different fashions, However, choosing to “come out” as a gay person can be easy or most often, a difficult proposition.

In “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Mathew Johnson, George opts out of sports and back in again as he chooses track and football. He opts out of a fraternity then opts in to a brotherhood at his college. This is typical of some gay men who follow the path of opting out of sports in rejecting masculinity.

Stereotypes seem to dominate LGBTQ communities but George seems to be able to ease into sports based on a gradual commitment and a determination to succeed and excel.

At my UK high school I felt like I had to play on the soccer team but was told I wasn’t good enough. I opted into the rugby team instead which was considered second rate. For me the team was a collection of misfits that embraced me. Their masculinity was the badge I needed at time.

In the U.S., there is a dominant traditional masculinity ideology rooted in a subjective and dated image of what men should and should not be.

This ideology is dictated by four main rules: men should not be feminine; men must be respected and admired; men should never show fear; and men should seek out risk and adventure.

Traditional gender role socialization leads men to struggle with four main factors of traditional masculinity: men should be successful, achieve power/status, and readily compete against others; men should restrict their emotions; men should restrict their affectionate behavior with other men; and men should be work/career driven.

Many gay men feel compelled to adhere to traditional enactments of masculinity even if it is not who they truly are. In other words, some gay men may feel pressured to behave “super-masculine” or to “butch it up” in order to be accepted. Yet, other gay men suggested that trying to be masculine may be a futile attempt as simply being gay negates one’s masculinity and makes achieving “true” masculinity unattainable.

The choice is yours!

Homophobia and racism is typically not evident in kids, unless they learn these actions for parents. Chris Crass’s book “White Fragility” understands that this in some white people is a product of the “Great Replacement Theory” in which the majority suppresses the minority because they fear being overtaken.

In “All Boys Aren’t Blue” George Johnson is subjected to bullying as a child. His mannerisms were viewed as those of a f**. As a redheaded boy I was bullied for my hair difference in my predominately white school. This small variation in hair color in no way equals the racism endured by Black boys. But if you are “other” you can be targeted.

There was a concept developed after the vicious slaying of. Mathew Shepard, that in the gay experience “It gets better” and a wait and see attitude is a good idea. This is nowadays patently untrue as the two books demonstrate.

George was bullied and was protected by his close Black family and had to learn to for himself later. Cross’s book exhort’s white people to learn the skills to continuously question racism and by inference homophobia.

The current political situation demands our vigilance as things don’t necessarily get better.

Happy Holidays

While vacationing in Maui, I realized that the area is extremely multiethnic and multicultural so I looked up the history of the state. It was an example of a colonial power grab. Also I reread “White Fragility” by Criss Crass.

“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Mathew Johnson. has been frequently challenged and banned in many U.S. schools and libraries, primarily for its LGBTQ+ themes, profanity, and sexually explicit content, making it one of the most challenged books in recent years. The Crass book shows how white people can lead white people to action on racism and try to make the world a better place for those at the margins.

This leads me to this series of short articles/podcasts. This is an homage to both a young and an old queer.

I will try to outline the Johnson book in terms of homophobia and racism and relate my history and coming out as an older gay cis gender white man. I will compare and contrast the two books and my (unpublished) life. The concept is to show that homophobia and racism and response to these two evils are important to us all.

Before I continue, I recognize my white privilege, and cannot fully walk in the shoes of George but have made effort to understand and to inform, particularly white folks on these ideas.

George was brought up in New Jersey with strong family bonds which helped him weather the bullying in school. His first realization of his identity comes when he realizes that the name he was using (Mathew) was a middle name and his first name was known to all his family, but not him. This angered him, but later he adopted George, then turned back to Mathew. He realized his power and identity in his name as a Black boy. This may appear trivial to a white person but Black history tells us that Black names were determined by slave owners!

My birth certificate shows Kenneth as my first name and I shorten it to Ken and my forefathers could change my surname at will as they moved. Our name may or may not denote being wealthy or tell the world where we come from, but a Black name could. Black names are identity and family.

Here in Hawaii names have a rich history deeply connected to nature, spirituality, and ancestry. Traditionally, names held mana (spiritual energy) and were often unisex. A 1860 law later mandated Western naming conventions, which were repealed in 1967.

And so, Black and Indigenous names were forced on enslaved or colonized people but names are identity to be preserved.

I am doing my podcast here in Maui, Hawaii and enjoying my vacation and trying to relax. But I am drifting in my cis gender white privilege and decided to look at the history of this state.

For many Americans, Hawaii lies in a hazy ether between statehood, colony, and exotic getaway. Despite their vacations to here, continental Americans know little about the cultures or histories of its Native people.

The US government brought it into focus when war came over the horizon. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

At the time, Hawaii was not a US state. It was illegally annexed territory: a military outpost, arms depot, and training site taken from Hawaiian hands in 1898.

This was the culmination of nearly two centuries of foreigners, especially whites interference and meddling, beginning with Captain Cook’s arrival. These developments showered wealth on a small, plantation elite, who required a docile land with docile people for extractive agriculture.

Their wish was granted by the United States military in 1893. In what President Grover Cleveland called “an act of war,” a cadre of businessmen and armed militiamen led an insurrection against Queen Lili‘uokalani, quickly setting up the all-white “Provisional Government of Hawai‘i” and demanding that Washington annex the islands to the United States.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom is unusual in that land theft and dispossession had all been accomplished without the usual bothersome wars and costly colonial administration.

Hawai‘i was a proving ground for American imperialism, a precursor of what would befall other small islands and atolls which stood in the way of American imperial ambition. After World War II, the US turbocharged its military base building project around the world, with a particular eye to the Pacific. In the process, many Indigenous peoples were displaced from their ancestral homelands and prevented from ever returning.

Throughout the Second World War and its aftermath, Hawaii was under martial law for seven years, during which time over 600,000 acres of land was confiscated, civil rights were held in abeyance, and a general atmosphere of military intimidation reigned.

Hawaii is also a tourist colony. Historically, its economy rested on whaling, then sandalwood logging, and later pineapple and sugarcane production. Today, it’s tourism that comprises the largest single source of private capital for Hawai‘i’s economy.

Sovereign debt makes matters worse. That most of the world’s island nations are both formerly colonized and deeply indebted is no coincidence. As the colonial project took off in the 17th century, imperial powers devoured small archipelagos the world over in the race for global hegemony. Islands were hoarded as both strategic military outposts (bases and depots) and sites for resource extraction (plantations and markets). After years of plunder and repression, a relationship of dependency between colonizer and colonized took hold, however massive a resistance Natives put up.

With 1.7 million tourists visiting the Kuwaii each year, even non-extractive activities like scuba diving and surfing tend to disrupt the local flora and fauna as well as traditional fishing practices.

Tourism dollars tend to not benefit locals, who work at big hotels, attractions, and sites but get paid a pittance. Locals generally get the pocket change spent on souvenirs, locally grown produce, or small-scale guided-tour outfits.

Hawai‘i is a beautiful place—there’s no doubt about it—but when the myths about “paradise” fall away, it’s hard to ignore the horrors that finally shrink-wrapped the islands into a tourist-friendly venue: two centuries of bayonets, bombardments, and subjection; missionaries hacking away at Hawaiian culture and philosophy; sugarcane plantation owners ravaging the soil; and the US military and real estate speculators despoiling the land. Tourism, it appears, is only the latest iteration of the devouring of Hawai‘i.

As I sit here I have to be reminded of my need to return to the mainland an continue to work on making a better world for all and especially for the people at the margins.

The United States now has a Department of War (again).

The U.S. military killed 11 people last week in a strike against a boat in the Caribbean the Trump administration said was carrying drugs and terrorists.

The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.

Pentagon officials were still working on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war authorization for use of military force.

The 2001 Congress allowed force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

But that law does not authorize war against unrelated groups that the executive branch has chosen to label as “terrorists.”

The specific details of the strike, targeting suspected drug smugglers, are novel, but — in a presidency defined by unprecedented uses of executive power — this is a much more typical type of presidential power grab.

Taking advantage of the fact that Democratic politicians will likely be hesitant to criticize them — lest they be seen as defending drug traffickers — the administration has shrugged off the legal worries.

The White House has suggested that further operations could be coming and “much larger effort to rid the region of narcotics trafficking and potentially dislodge [the country’s leader Nicolas] Maduro from power.”

The lack of information and transparency from the administration is very concerning.

The Pentagon has been amassing a small armada of warships in the southern Caribbean, to include three guided-missile destroyers.

History has taught us many lessons and we should pay attention to its signs because we might be heading towards World War III

What if your skin is light, but your curls reveal your Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means one cannot easily check off one box or another. The number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

And what if you are too Black to be white and too white to be Black.

And often the term “mulatto,” is used. it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents. Derived from the Spanish word for mule, or “mulo,” it was used during slavery to liken biracial people to the hybrid animal and to justify their legal and social oppression. If this is used to describe you, you may feel mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

For somebody to use it today, it really is an especially derogatory use, because it’s really going back to the era of slavery in the U.S.

Racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding, and this kind of dehumanizing language is not unusual.

In the current political moment, we are really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,”

Also, there is a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them. Enslaved women were sexually abused all the time.

“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood. The 1870 census defined “mulatto” as including “all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people, which was a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.

Our society’s ideas about race are constantly fluctuating. Racial categories have changed on nearly every census since the first in 1790. The 2030 census will include new “Hispanic or Latino” and “Middle Eastern or North African” boxes to check.

Race is a political and social classification system, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”

The deepest divide in this country is not perhaps one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals. It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other. Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.

Racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned. That kind of thinking doesn’t just fade with time. Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.

The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product, as the refrain goes. Many social media sites and search engines that provide free services do so in exchange for your personal data.

But with this, consumers give up data that enables companies to sometimes charge them more for products. I have done this in the past but try to avoid it.

This is a practice in which a company sets a price for particular consumers based on what it gleans from their personal data. New parents, for example, may be shown baby thermometers at the top of their search results that are more expensive than those shown to others.

As digital tracking becomes more sophisticated, more companies began using consumers’ data to set personalized prices. Studies by the Federal Trade Commission found that personal information — including mouse movements and items abandoned in shopping carts — was being used to set prices for individual consumers.

The study is ongoing, and will release the findings of the study to the public once it’s complete.

Surveillance pricing sits at the intersection of two things most people revile: feeling tracked and feeling ripped off.

Lawmakers are working to restrict the practice at the state level, including in California, Georgia and Illinois. A law requiring companies to disclose its use is working its way through the New York Legislature. And New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a consumer alert to warn New Yorkers about the practice, and encouraged them to file complaints if they encountered violations in the wild.

Companies have always been free to set prices based on their own costs, and what they think the market will bear. But with surveillance pricing, prices are not so much about supply and demand as they are about what a particular individual might be willing to pay. Though unappealing to consumers, the practice is, unfortunately, broadly legal.

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and consumer advocate said in an interview that she could not pinpoint the exact origin of the phrase. But she acknowledged that it may have emerged from conversations she started having with friends in recent years, in a time of “feeling a lot of urgency in finding a way to communicate one of the biggest revolutions in the markets and economy.”

Beyond the name, the practice, she noted, is visceral, and disturbing, to many consumers: “Whenever people really think about prices being set using the same blob of intimate details that decides their TikTok feed, they get freaked out,” and the idea that retailers could use “your keystrokes, your eye movements, your mood, to set the price of diapers and bread hits a deep nerve.”

Racism is not only morally wrong, but it also has massive detriments to our economy. In a recent study by Citigroup, “Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps,” economists state that in the last 20 years, racism has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion. This is not insignificant as the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is more than $21 trillion.

These effects are stark in housing, education, and tax policy.

Housing is a major source of intergenerational wealth for many people. However, public, private, and federal discrimination and policies like redlining prevented families of color from owning a home and devalued their homes.

Decades of obstacles to homeownership meant that families of color have missed out on the benefits of rising home values. This is critical, as owning a home is crucial for wealth accumulation.

A study by Princeton University notes “that even among Black families owning homes, properties do not appreciate at the same rate as properties held by other ethnic groups.”

In 2016, the Federal Reserve found that the median amount of housing wealth for a Black family was $124,000; for white families, it was $200,000.

All forms of discrimination are very costly to the economy. Economists estimate that $218 billion was lost in the last two decades due to discrimination in providing credit—lending and receiving loans—to families of color to purchase homes.

In February 2021, the Austin family bought and renovated a house in Marin City, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Despite the location and $400,000 in renovations, it appraised for $989,000, or just $100,000 more than its appraisal before the renovations.

The Austin family suspected racism and got a second appraisal. This time the house was staged to make it seem like a white family owned it. The house was appraised for $1,482,000, almost 50% more than its previous appraisal. A family of color in the U.S. cannot use their home to build wealth and contribute to the economy if their homes continue to be devalued.

The adverse effects of racism build upon themselves. Due to housing discrimination, the education of Black people suffered as well. Property taxes fund local schools; schools in wealthier areas receive more funding than those in poorer areas.

Due to years of racial segregation, families of colors’ homes are worth less, which means their schools are not as well funded. The result is that children of color often don’t get a high-quality education.

Education is fundamental to increasing a person’s income and potential. Over 40 years, a person with a college degree and advanced degree will earn $1.3 million to $2 million, respectively, compared with a high school graduate.

Since more Black students fail to access quality education at a younger age, the path towards college and advanced degrees is extremely difficult. The Citigroup study estimates that it costs the economy billions of dollars, as “$90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income is lost from discrimination in accessing higher education.”

Racism also negatively impacts our tax system, which currently gives more advantages to people with wealth, which is highly concentrated in white families. According to the Brookings Institution, the net worth of a median white household is ten times that of the median Black household.

A lower tax rate on income from wealth versus wages perpetuates the existing racial wealth divide. While tax advantages like the mortgage interest deduction provide additional tax relief for homeowners, there is typically no deduction or credit for renting. All over the tax code, benefits are given to people who have wealth.

It is critical to address racism, as decades of housing discrimination in real estate, homeownership, lending, and federal policies means Black, Latino, and Native American households are more likely than white households to be low-income renters.

Congress needs to enact a tax system that stops advantaging income from wealth over income from wages. We should advocate for Congress to increase taxes on corporations and the capital gains tax.

The current capital gains tax allows families to transfer vast sums of wealth across generations with minimal tax from art, real estate, and stocks. By prioritizing the taxing of wealth, we are working to close the racial wealth divide.

It may seem that racism in our economy only affects people of color, but it costs all of us. It has cost us trillions of dollars and hurt our country’s economic potential, but we can change this.

I am 79 and am lucky to be able to speak my mind, so as eight Democratic-aligned senators with an average age of about 70 voted with Republicans to end the 40-day shutdown without the health care concessions I ask how old is too old to fight Republicans?

Let’s look at how this capitulation and the subsequent anger played out in the arguments. So many members of Congress who are at (and well beyond) retirement age.

Democrats are denouncing Mr. Schumer and this deal to end the government shutdown that their voters hate. But they offer no plausible account of how they would have done better, because maybe there isn’t one.

It’s a lot easier to vote for something your base hates if you’re too old to worry about re-election.

Of the Democratic-aligned senators who voted for the shutdown deal, two are not running again: Dick Durbin of Illinois, 80, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, 78. Angus King of Maine is 81 and Jacky Rosen of Nevada is 68. Both Tim Kaine of Virginia and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire are 67.

All would be past 70 years old if they decide to run again when their terms end.

The other “yes” votes were from Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, 61, representing a state where the Las Vegas tourism industry feared taking a major hit from canceled flights, and from John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is just 56 but has embraced Trump on a slew of issues.

This is called a gerontocracy. When you have older leaders who are never going to face re-election again, you make decisions that can be disconnected from what their voters believe.

Yet the age issue is likely to keep flaring up. Senator Chuck Schumer’s top three midterm recruits would be in their 80s by the end of a second term.

This is a matter of how much to fight, and who should lead the charge. Remember, Democrats were less than a week removed from sweeping victories in California, New Jersey and Virginia. For many in the party, Tuesday’s elections were the first time in a year that they could feel good about their collective ability to punch back against extremism.

They wanted the Republicans to fund Affordable Care Act subsidies — with polls showing that voters were generally on the Democrats’ side.

Many progressives and younger Democrats have argued increasingly loudly that Schumer, 74, is no longer up to the fight.

Feeding the discontent are memories of the last shutdown fight in March, when Schumer led Senate Democrats to make a deal with Republicans to keep the government open. Then as now, the party’s base and most of its members in Congress wanted the fight against Trump and his allies.

In one sign of how far out on an island the eight senators are, they drew backhanded scorn from the Democratic National Committee, which rarely intervenes in intra party disputes.

This is all taking place as Trump issued preemptive pardons to Rudolph Giuliani and a host of people who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.

In a world without the Democratic senators’ capitulation, the pardons might have been a galvanizing issue for the party’s elected officials to rally around while continuing to press their case that spiraling health insurance costs were too high.

Fortunately for Democrats, they had some wins that should not be discounted. They raised the salience of soaring health insurance premiums and sent the message that Republicans made the policy that caused them. They goaded Trump into making unpopular moves to withhold food stamps that appear to have hurt his poll numbers. It’s possible the shutdown has still been a net political gain for the Democratic Party despite its necessarily ignominious end.

Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. Our values are on the side of people at the margins who are suffering endlessly with the extremists world view.