Einstein's Racism Exposed Banned
Einstein's Racism Exposed by Christopher Jon Bjerknes - BANNED!
- Einstein's Racism Exposed by Christopher Jon Bjerknes. This book was banned by Amazon and Kindle on 10 August 2020 because they deemed it "offensive" after having published it and selling it for two years. Added date 2020-08-11 16:28:35
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Racism "a disease of white people"
Image source, AFP/Getty
Image caption,
Albert Einstein wrote the travel diaries on a trip to Asia and the Middle East in the 1920s
Newly published private travel diaries have revealed Albert Einstein's racist and xenophobic views.
Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries track his experiences in Asia and the Middle East.
In them, he makes sweeping and negative generalisations, for example calling the Chinese "industrious, filthy, obtuse people".
Einstein would later in life advocate for civil rights in the US, calling racism "a disease of white people".
This is the first time the diaries have been published as a standalone volume in English.
Published by Princeton University Press, The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922-1923 was edited by Ze'ev Rosenkranz, assistant director of the California Institute of Technology's Einstein Papers Project.
Einstein travelled from Spain to the Middle East and via Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, on to China and Japan.
The physicist describes arriving in Port Said in Egypt and facing "Levantines of every shade... as if spewed from hell" who come aboard their ship to sell their goods.
He also describes his time in Colombo in Ceylon, writing of the people: "They live in great filth and considerable stench down on the ground, do little, and need little."
CEYLONESE - “They live in great filth and considerable stench down on the ground, do little, and need little,” he wrote.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Einstein went on the trip with his wife Elsa
But the famous physicist reserves his most cutting comments for Chinese people.
According to a piece in the Guardian about the diaries, he describes Chinese children as "spiritless and obtuse", and calls it "a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races".
In other entries he calls China "a peculiar herd-like nation," and "more like automatons than people", before claiming there is "little difference" between Chinese men and women, and questioning how the men are "incapable of defending themselves" from female "fatal attraction".
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Noted for both his scientific brilliance and his humanitarianism, Albert Einstein emigrated to the US in 1933 after the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.
The Jewish scientist described racism as "a disease of white people" in a 1946 speech at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Diaries reflect changing views
Analysis by Chris Buckler, BBC News, Washington
Einstein's theory of relativity changed how people thought about space and time but these diaries demonstrate how his own personal views about race seem to have altered over the years.
The writings may have been intended as private thoughts but their publication will upset some in America, where campaigners still celebrate Albert Einstein as one of the voices that helped shine a light on segregation.
When he moved to the US in 1933 he was taken aback by the separate schools and cinemas for blacks and whites and Einstein subsequently joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He is said to have told people that he saw similarities in the way Jews were being hounded in Germany and how African-Americans were being treated in his new homeland.
He chose Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black college, to give one of his most damning speeches just a year after the end of World War Two.
His diaries are full of gut reactions and private insights. In the context of the 21st Century they may tarnish the reputation of a man who is revered almost as much as a humanitarian as a scientist.
But the words were written before he saw what racism could lead to in America and Germany - a country he had effectively fled.
Albert Einstein’s Travel Diaries Reveal Racist Comments
The famed physicist would later denounce racism, but his diaries reveal shocking reflections from when he was a young man.
By: Dave Roos
Updated: August 29, 2018 | Original: June 14, 2018
Popperfoto/Getty Images
Albert Einstein, the German-born Nobel prize-winning physicist, became an outspoken civil rights advocate after immigrating to the United States in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. But newly published travel diaries from the 1920s, when Einstein and his wife Elsa embarked on a months-long voyage to the Far East and Middle East, reveal a younger man who himself harbored xenophobic and even racist views.
In passages from The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein, edited by Ze’ev Rosenkrantz, Einstein muses on the character and nature of the people he meets in Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan and Palestine, sometimes in insulting and stereotypical terms.
The Chinese, Einstein wrote, were “industrious” but also “filthy.” He described them as a “peculiar, herd-like nation often more like automatons than people.” Even though he only spent a few days in China, Einstein felt confident enough to cast judgment on the entire country and its inhabitants, at least in his private journal.
“It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races,” Einstein wrote. “For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”
While visiting Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, Einstein was moved to pity for the crowds of beggars lining the streets of the capital city Colombo, but also described the mostly Indian panhandlers in dehumanizing terms. “They live in great filth and considerable stench down on the ground, do little, and need little,” he wrote.
An illustration depicting Einstein emigrating to the United States. (Credit: Photo12/UIG via Getty Images) Chinese children are "spiritless and obtuse", "a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races".
In other entries he calls China "a peculiar herd-like nation," and "more like automatons than people",
Later in life, Einstein compared of his experience as a Jew in Germany—where anti-Semitism dogged him long before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis—to the plight of blacks in America. As early as 1931, Einstein spoke out against the racially motivated “Scotsboro Boys” trial and contributed as essay on racism to a magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP. In a famous 1946 commencement address at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, Einstein said that segregation was “not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”
So what is to be made of Einstein’s early, private writings in which the greatest mind of the 20th century expressed such ugly views?
Rosenkrantz, who is senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, told the Washington Post that “It would be easy to say, yes, he became more enlightened,” but that it’s possible that Einstein continued to harbor racist or xenophobic opinions in private.
What’s clear is that Einstein was a complex human being with faults as well as tremendous gifts.
“One should emphasize the different elements and contradictory elements in the statements that he made and in his personality,” Rosenkranz told the Post. “On one hand, he was very generous and very favorable. … But there’s also these statements that one should not ignore.”
By: Dave Roos
Dave Roos is a journalist and podcaster based in the U.S. and Mexico. He's the co-host of Biblical Time Machine, a history podcast, and a writer for the popular podcast Stuff You Should Know. Learn more at daveroos.com.
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