Ah Well! Einstein's travel diaries reveal 'shocking' xenophobia

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/12/einsteins-travel-diaries-reveal-shocking-xenophobia
<snip>
The publication of Albert Einstein’s private diaries detailing his tour of Asia in the 1920s reveals the theoretical physicist and humanitarian icon’s racist attitudes to the people he met on his travels, particularly the Chinese.

Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries see the scientist musing on his travels, science, philosophy and art. In China, the man who famously once described racism as “a disease of white people” describes the “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” he observes. He notes how the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.” After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

Ze’ev Rosenkranz, senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, said: “I think a lot of comments strike us as pretty unpleasant – what he says about the Chinese in particular.

“They’re kind of in contrast to the public image of the great humanitarian icon. I think it’s quite a shock to read those and contrast them with his more public statements. They’re more off guard, he didn’t intend them for publication.”
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I weep for this planet

[IluvPitties]

1. Nobody's perfect.

[Sophia4]

2. Put it in historical context.

We know a lot more about the people of the world today than even Einstein knew in his day.

And our grandchildren will know much more than we do about the world and the universe.

[bornfree17]

27. I couldn't

Have said it better

[jberryhill]

3. .

[Mc Mike]

4. Mark Twain had a positive impact in the US regarding how

Black Americans were perceived. But he disliked the Irish and Native Americans.

[malaise]

5. True

[Mc Mike]

6. I have some Irish in me, but don't hold it against him.

He wrote some hilarious things, and his War Prayer and coverage of the Spanish American war were fantastic.

[malaise]

7. I'm a huge fan of Twain

Love his Letters from Earth.

[Phoenix61]

12. One of my favorites nt

[Ferrets are Cool]

8. Just from reading the paragraphs posted here...

I don't see racism.

[malaise]

9. I read more

Where we agree is that commenting on nasty living conditions is not racist, but writing about why a Chinese man would be attracted to a Chinese woman or want to produce children is racist to the core

[Ferrets are Cool]

11. There we agree 100%

[manor321]

10. The past is a foreign country. n/t

[elias7]

13. Let us be judged by the standards of 100 years from now

and see how well some of our ideas and ways of being hold up.

[trof]

15. I can see it now.

Nana! You mean you actually BURNED FUELS to travel from one place to another?
Didn't you KNOW what that was doing to the planet?
Why didn't you just teleport like we do now?

[elias7]

28. And you flushed your bodily waste into the water?

You people were such pigs! I’m pruning you out of my family tree!

[trof]

30. That too.

[Oneironaut]

14. You kind of need to compare him to the average person of his time, not the average person now.

We will probably not be judged too well 100 years from now. That is because society is constantly evolving. What is shockingly racist and unacceptable now was accepted and commonplace then.

Watch any 80's or 90's movie and see their treatment of the LGBT community. Look at the noble savage cliches used in older movies. Watch some of the WWII-era Looney Tunes cartoons, or Dr. Seuss propaganda posters against the Japanese. These seem offensive now, but were normal then.

[JI7]

16. So did Gandhi, Dickens, che guevara etc

Times were different back then .

None of this takes away from his greatness for me.

[malaise]

19. So slavery, colonialism, the slaughter of indigenous folks everywhere

can be excused away because the perpetrators were all racists?

Sorry folks.

[JI7]

20. Einstein didn't support slavery and slaughter

[malaise]

22. I'm not suggesting that at all

but if we say they were all racists others will use that to explain away genocide and slavery and a plethora of other evils committed by man against man and woman. I'm not buying that.

[JI7]

23. He was better than most people of his times. If he had lived im sure

His views would have improved even more.

[malaise]

24. On that we agree

[mn9driver]

17. Einstein's views were fairly typical of Europeans in general and Germans in particular

Taking his private writings a hundred years later as an indictment of his character implies that he was somehow supposed to be more enlightened about these things than everyone else he knew.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln said this in a speech:

I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch, as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.

By the end of the civil war his views had changed, but by today’s standards Lincoln remained deeply racist until he was assassinated.

By the standards of the time, he was much more enlightened than most white people.

[LSFL]

18. by the standards of his time

He was much more enlightened than the deplorables too.
At least he knew to fight traitors rather than elect them.

[wellst0nev0ter]

25. Hopefully his thinking evolved

after the Holocaust happened.

[malaise]

21. Valid point

but his diaries show 'shocking xenophobia' as the Guardian states.

[Revanchist]

26. Are you telling me that a white European in the 1920s

Was acting like a white European in the 1920s? I'm shocked, shocked I say!!!!!

You want to see a real, hardcore racist from that time frame? Read up on H.P. Lovecraft, his stories might be considered classic and groundbreaking, but boy the man covered all the bases: racist, xenophobe, anti semite, a real triple crown winner in that field.

[treestar]

29. It is shocking

I suppose it possible to be a scientific genius but not understand people too well. Yet a scientist would have to be smart enough to consider different cultures exist and approach things differently. There are Chinese geniuses - and I'd have thought he would have met them first. Average uneducated white people exist too. So he'd have seen that.