Einstein’s diaries reveal a xenophobic, misogynistic side
In 1946, Albert Einstein stood in front of students at the oldest historically black college in the United States and decried the oppression of African Americans.
“There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it,” he said during a commencement speech at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
As a Jewish scientist who experienced anti-Semitism in Germany, Einstein showed deep sympathy for black people in America. He wandered around black neighborhoods in segregated Princeton, N.J., his home after leaving Germany amid the rise of the Nazis, sat on people’s porches, chatted with them, and handed out candies to their children and grandchildren.
But there’s another side to Einstein that perhaps people did not know then.
One of the travel diaries he wrote during a months-long voyage in the 1920s reveals that in his private moments, the Nobel-winning physicist portrayed people of other races, such as Chinese and Indians, in a stereotypical, dehumanizing way. Einstein’s unfiltered musings about the people he saw and interacted with during his journey show that even the civil rights icon and “paragon” of humanitarianism harbored racist thoughts about those who did not look like him, said Ze’ev Rosenkranz, senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology.
“In published statements, he’s usually in favor of civil and human rights and was socially progressive. I’m not saying that he didn’t believe in those things,” Rosenkranz said, but, he added, the words Einstein never intended to be published are in stark contrast with his more-guarded public statements.
That contradiction makes Einstein all the more human, said Rosenkranz, who edited “The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein,” published recently by Princeton University Press.
“I’m not apologizing for him or anything . . . I still feel that the unpleasant remarks are quite shocking, but they do reveal that we all have this darker side to our attitudes and prejudices,” he said.
Einstein wrote the travel diary from October 1922 to March 1923, when he and wife Elsa traveled by ship to the Mediterranean, Sri Lanka, China and Japan. He wrote every day about his surroundings.
He also chronicled his observations of people he saw and met, summing up “their personalities and idiosyncrasies in just a few, often humorous or irreverent, words,” Rosenkranz wrote in the introduction portion of the travel diary.
The average Japanese, Einstein wrote, is “unproblematic, impersonal, he cheerfully fulfills the social function which befalls him without pretension, but proud of his community and nation.”
His reflections about the Chinese, with whom he spent far less time, were more callous, even insulting. Though he called the Chinese “industrious,” he also described them as “filthy” and “obtuse.”