EINSTEIN’S RACIAL BIAS:
Feared the Chinese could ‘supplant’ other races
Not all of Albert Einstein's theories were worth publishing.
The renowned physicist expressed racist views about Chinese people and others during a voyage through East Asia and the Middle East in the early 1920s, newly translated diary entries show.
He complained about Chinese people's “abundance of offspring.”
“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.”
At another point, he compared the way Chinese people sit to eat with the way Europeans squatted when going to the bathroom outside.
“All this occurs quietly and demurely,” the future Nobel Prize winner said. “Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.”
The notes, made from October 1922 to March 1923, were released by the Princeton Press as “The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein.”
“In light of these instances, we must conclude that Einstein did make quite a few racist and dehumanizing comments in the diary, some of which were extremely unpleasant,” Ze'ev Rosenkranz, an Einstein expert at the California Institute of Technology who translated the diary, told the Guardian.
Some of the comments could be called shocking, given Einstein fled his native Germany to escape Nazi persecution against Jews. Later living in the U.S., he called racism the "disease of white people” and fought against segregation while living in New Jersey.
A Princeton Press website for the diary warns: “Entries also contain passages that reveal Einstein's stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race.”
“It seems that even Einstein sometimes had a very hard time recognizing himself in the face of the other,” Rosenkranz told Guardian.