Would you consider Albert Einsteins Travel Diary Observations Racist?

[TidWell]

Albert Einsteins Travel Diary was published and he gives his observations of the different cultures he visited, do you consider him a racist? His harshest criticism was for the Chinese people.

Einstein's travel diaries reveal physicist's racism

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."

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".


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 - the first university in the US to award degrees to black people.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44472277
https://www.livescience.com/62813-einstein-racist.html
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/06/13/einsteins-diaries-contain-shocking-details-his-racism.html

 

[M3t4tr0n]

Cancel his show!

Maybe he changed his views later in life?

 

[bushman505]

No

 

[GearSolidMetal]

He should be thrown off twitter.

 

[all caps]

Racism as a "disease of white people"

 

[JonnyRingo84]

i dont know that its racist, what hes said there. but any time you try to pigeonhole 1 billion or more people in a breath, you should probably reconsider.

 

[nostradumbass]

Never read it, but yes.

 

[Cojopi Extomino]

It's cool, nobody likes the chinese.

 

[mb23100]

Ban the theory of relativity. Back to the Stone age we go

 

[Jorge Luis Borges]

any time you try to pigeonhole 1 billion or more people in a breath, you should probably reconsider.

This is gold.

 

[TidWell]

i dont know that its racist, what hes said there. but any time you try to pigeonhole 1 billion or more people in a breath, you should probably reconsider.

LOL
It seems people have the same view of Chinese even in the early 1900s.

 

[luckyshot]

LOL
It seems people have the same view of Chinese even in the early 1900s.

I don’t think Chinese people are obtuse or spiritless, but as a westerner, they definitely take some getting used to.

One factor is that their language uses different inflections for different words. As a westerner, you are used to using inflection to understand emotion— so communication can feel very alien without that cue.

 

[Fedorable]

there's only two things in this world I hate; racists and the chinese.

 

[TribalDrumz]

but they are a herd like nation

 

[SRN]

No, anachronism is not something that should be stimulated, as a matter of fact we need to prevent it from happening. Just think about it... How is it possible to judge anyone that was born back in 19th century with today's morals?

 

[TheGreatA]

Meeting Chinese in the early 20th century was probably a shock to a guy like Einstein, who spent his life as an upper class citizen in the West, amongst the brightest intellectuals that the world could offer at that time. A lot of people make the same observations about the Chinese now, but a hundred years ago, they were even more impoverished, their government was in shambles and there was no education whatsoever for the common people, who were mostly illiterate peasants who obeyed folklore tradition.

From that perspective it's understandable that his first impressions were very bad.

But as we can see, stereotyping other ethnicities is not limited to only white people, or unintelligent people. Einstein was certainly not dumb, but still, he came to hold these views even though he supposedly possessed a "higher intelligence".

 

[CWMMA]

People just wanting to throw a wrench into the legacy of a great man.

 

[Amerikuracana]

He didn't know he wasn't allowed to talk about what he saw with his eyes. Not his fault.

 

[ObsoleteSoul]

People just want to push our values/morals on people of the past. It doesnt really work that way. Im much more concerned with what people do, and what they say to the public, instead of old personal journals from when they were younger. People change their views as they age.

 

[Lord Coke]

First Hp Lovecraft now Einstein. When is the left going to let dead men rest