EINSTEIN’S RACISM IS A RATHER DARK MATTER
IT was out of character when the aloof, distant, emotionally unavailable Albert Einstein gifted his wife some artwork. She knew better than to get excited – it was simply a detailed drawing of his foot so she could tailor him the perfect sock. Ever the logician, this selfish gesture made perfect sense to Albert. He had feet and a wife who could sew. Socks or mc2, both are simply conclusions to cold calculations.
Perhaps Einstein had simply outgrown his brain’s empathetic static, that hunger for emotional reciprocation gifted to us by evolution to maintain social order. Despite his saintly posthumous persona, there is clear evidence that paints the young Einstein as a chap whose much-vaunted “humanity” was actually a wildly prejudiced, dispassionate study in societal anthropology.
Certainly, a dark disdain for his fellow man has been revealed in private diaries which finally went on public view this week.
Penned in the 20s, these jottings mainly detail the physicist’s tour of Asia and his highly questionable attitudes towards folk he observed on his travels. In particular, the Chinese. A great bunch of lads, according to Father Ted. Einstein disagreed. Like Ted, he preferred to group individuals as a collective and branded the entire Chinese population – 400 million at the time – “peculiar, herd-like … often more like automatons than people”. And, typical of Einstein, he was thinking of the future when he signed off with the zinger: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races.” The Bernard Manning of physics had spoken.
A spectacular level of conceit is also evident in a lame yet rather lyrical piece of “othering” which conveyed Einstein’s distaste for Chinese women. Unlike his foot sketch this critique was, assumedly, an attempt at humour – yet its laboured structure suggests a sentence squeezed out by the bowels of the mind as some sort of dirty protest against decency. Einstein wrote: “... how little difference there is between (the) men and women. I don’t understand what kind of fatal attraction Chinese women possess which enthrals the corresponding men to such an extent that they are incapable of defending themselves against the formidable blessing of offspring.” A simple “don’t fancy yours much” would have done, Albert. He certainly wouldn’t have been a fan of xhamster.com. The irony of having expressed such abhorrent views on racial superiority was likely not lost on Einstein when he was forced to flee Germany 10 years later. Dehumanising Nazi propaganda, echoing his own musings on Chinese inferiority, had stoked anti-semitic fervour to fever pitch in his homeland. Einstein was forced to face himself in the mirror and see the real-world consequences of casual stereotypes and generalisations when used as weapons by politicians.
And as his star rose and influence grew in America, a newfound devotion towards civil rights and race relations made it clear that this great teacher of the universe’s secrets had learned a powerful lesson of his own in humility.