Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

We can look at Garner, and see that a great injustice happened to him.

Compare to Brown. The police had a very good reason to stop him (walking in the middle of the street, matches description of person who had just robbed a nearby store and assaulted the shop keeper), and he attacked the police officer and tried to take the officer's gun. The only thing it appears that the police officer did wrong was letting Brown approach the car while the officer was inside with his gun still holstered, which allowed Brown into a position to attack.

Looking at Brown, we see a man who did something really stupid, and suffered pretty much the same outcome that we'd expect for anyone in that situation.

Lumping Garner and Brown together, like these protestors are doing, seems to me to be an insult to the memory of Eric Garner.

People have been noticing this and pointing it out for a long, long time. Surely Einstein would observe similar treatments as well, particularly because of his fresh perspective.

What's scary about privilege is that it's usually invisible.

I think it's fair to say that the majority of humans experience both prejudice and privelege, albeit of radically different quantities and qualities. But while we can't help but be keenly aware of the former, the latter tends to hide itself in our definitions of "normal".

Aristotle proposed in Book 1 of Politics that certain human beings were natural slaves, as different from the free citizens of Athens as human beings were from beasts. He argued that barbarians deserved enslavement because they lacked souls.

Back in 1550, Aristotle was marshalled in an important debate on race: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valladolid_debate

While much of the debate was around the notion that Spain had the right to conquer the Americas, a major part of Bartolomé de las Casas' debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda centred on the rights of Native Americans. Both men were humanist theologians and well versed in classical works, so Aristotle's idea of Natural Slavery was central to their cases.

De las Casas argued that native Americans were worthy of the same rights as European Christians because they were rational human beings with souls, not natural slaves. Years later, De las Casas expanded this idea to a universal statement that no human being regardless of race deserved slavery.

Sepúlveda took Aristotle on face value and argued that Native Americans were natural slaves and as such didn't deserve to be treated as rational human beings, he made the odious argument that enslaving them was a paternal response which improved their lives.

It's important to note that the debate on the shared humanity of the races and their human rights is an argument that is at least half a millennium old.

If we had everyone in the country run a race and the fastest were forced to move to the west coast and the slowest forced to move to the east coast and we waited a generation, people would start saying west coast people are fast in general. And they wouldn't be incorrect. So I don't see anything wrong with Aristotle saying the group of people who end up slaves are inferior, they provably are because they've been tested and selected for failure.

Saying Greeks are superior to Iranians or some other general pronouncement about ethnicity and attributes may not be correct, the DNA of the human race is mostly the same between ethnicities anyway, but saying Greeks are superior to the group of people they defeated in battle and enslaved in person is a tautology.

That's what happens when you end up neighbors with the great great grandson of the bloke your great great granddaddy paid to have kidnapped and shipped to the country as a piece of equipment.

Sure you can argue over the details about what their family have been like to be around in the intervening time, but don't be surprised if the conversation gets back around to the question of who exactly kidnapped who in the first place.

Is pretty pointless to winge about it being political.

People who continue to advance a hypothesis long after the data falsifies it, in order to support political views that are, subject to the true facts, immoral, should in fact be purged from civil society.

No, black people are not innately inferior in any physical, intellectual, or moral sense.

No, women are not innately inferior in any physical, intellectual, or moral sense.

No, Jews are not conspiring to take over the world.

Yes, you are a racist, and yes, you should leave the public eye right now. Nobody will miss you, as you've done nothing but attempt to muddy waters that were long-since cleared up.

The facts cannot speak, and thus, alas, cannot repeat themselves until you actually bother to listen, but I for one am tired of your like.

Maybe instead of forcing segregation, or forcing integration, freedom of association could be tried?

http://ncase.me/polygons/

I'm not so sure. I went to a very diverse and large high school in NJ and what ends up happening is self segregation. All the ethnic groups would mostly end up hanging out with their own types.

I'm going with good, fair, and free mass education. All the way to college. If everyone gets the same level of education then no one will FEEL out of place in any culture as they will be aware of common cultural differences through education.

Good education repairs a LOT of social ills.

For whatever it is worth, I think income inequality (between rich and poor, all races) is probably the biggest inhibitor to this problem. Motivated-yet-poor people cannot easily break out of their groups, with no money for college and (alot of times) a criminal record preventing them from enlisting in the service. If you have resources you have choices, and the poor have very little in the way of choice. And the affluent who do have a choice will almost always make the choice to not live among those who have nothing to lose, whatever their color may be.

It's far from certain. For example, Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam has (tentatively and, I think, somewhat reluctantly) suggested the opposite. Here's an interview he did for National Public Radio:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1280266...

Money quote:

Social scientist Robert Putnam, probably best known for his work "Bowling Alone," on the decline of civic engagement, wanted to know does diversity have an impact on our sense of community? His recent finding suggest that diversity might not make us stronger. In fact, it might just be the opposite. It might make us less inclined to participate in civic life, at least in the short term.

The faster we demonstrate to our younger generations that our erroneous tradition must be corrected, the faster the goals of more diversity and elimination of racial bias can be achieved.

If I were to ask, "what can a man of good will do to combat tornado calamities", would you respond with a "more air temperature homogeneity would certainly help"?

We can't reasonably engineer or create "neighborhood diversity". There are some policies that have tried to accomplish this, and they fail miserably. The "diversity" ends up artificial and hollow, and does nothing for prejudice. In some cases it seems to amplify it.

> the transition from "us" and "them" to a unified "us."

There can never be an "us" when we're talking about the 300 million people in the United States. There can't even be an "us" if you're talking about the 8 million in New York City, or the 500,000 in Atlanta.

Human beings are limited in their ability to form an "us", and it's in the low hundreds.

http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/12/R...

There is a liberal-conservative correlation on the map, a but far stronger correlation is the racial makeup of the state. The "deep roots" of racism don't seem to go away with exposure. Other empirical data, such as Robert Putnam's work mentioned in another comment, suggest just the opposite.

A lot of the cultural Marxist agendas being promoted in recent years are based on bad data and slanted measurements (e.g. the "pay gap" between men and women, which disappears when you control for hours worked, age, and other important variables). Such agendas are explicitly aimed at going well beyond mere "fairness" (i.e. equality of opportunity) and are aimed at seizing power from disfavored groups, and reallocating it to favored groups.

We don't have a racism of segregation anymore. It's a racism of omission. Instead there are pay gaps, unfair justice, stereotypes and erasure. EG: It's not that we censor out black music on the radio, we just prefer it when a white person sings it (macklemore, iggy azalea, eminem, miley, etc).

It works the same way as telling woman: "oh I don't see you as a woman in the workplace. I don't expect you to get pregnant or have health issues different from men. I expect you to have someone at home who takes care of your kids (like a wife would). And then I will subconsciously expect you to be more caring and nice than your male coworkers (if you disagree with anything I say I will call you a frigid bitch)". The roles we put women in are gendered, like EG: we don't expect a secretary to be a woman but if she is, she'll get very different treatment from a male secretary (who is more likely to be called Operations, won't have to pick up everybody's laundry and order lunch, etc. This happens for real).

Back to racism. Racism is still a _big_ problem for a lot of people. Police can strangle black people _on camera_ and get away without even a trial. Cops drove up to a black child with a toy gun, shot him, then did not even call an ambulance or provide emergency CPR. Police officers barged into a house and shot a 7 year old black girl while she was sleeping. (They said they had the wrong house). No repercussions. Not a settlement, not an apology, no reaction.

Young black men are 21 more times more likely to be shot by a police officer than their white counterparts.

When you tell someone 'I don't see you black' what you are saying is "I am ignoring the struggles you face on a daily basis and also will continue to subconsciously treat you negatively". Ask a black person how many times they get called Bro, homie, or 'my nigga' by people 'who don't see them as black'. And in the public consciousness, black people are seen as demons, monsters, thugs. (further reading: the blue eye brown eye experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZKWkhnSb5k)

> The idea that certain groups of people (blacks, women, gays, etc) need compulsory protection at the expense of other groups (white males), induces a sort of resentment as a response to what is perceived to be a witch hunt.

White males have been oppressing these marginalized groups for millennia. White male culture is homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, and racist too. If you would like examples I can give plenty. If you want stats I can give those too.

Brendan Eich's dismissal isn't irrational. A group of people decided that they didn't want a homophobic CEO.

I think the reason these events might seen incoherent is because they look like small, one time things that bring up a large public reaction, one person's slip-up here or a wrong sentence uttered here. But:

1) The things said reflect a deep hatred of the group they are against. You have really hate black people to nigger like Paula Dean did. Eich is clearly homophobic if he donates to anti gay marriage groups.

2) They might seem like one group is targeted out of the blue, but to the oppressed group these events are another thing on the long list of violence done against them. For example, if you were a woman at a tech conference and heard a thousand different dongle jokes, POSIX forking references, images of naked women, etc, on the thousand and oneth dongle joke you might get angry too. That might be seen as irrational, because hey, it's just a joke... It's not. Culture is the sum total of our collective experiences, it's made of a gajillion little things put together. People have the right to complain about these little things, like t-shirts that don't fit women at conferences. If everywhere you looked you found 'little' examples of people like you getting the short end of the stick, you wouldn't be too happy either.

3) Sometimes these things might seem out of the blue because of the way collective consciousness works. Recently twitter directed a lot of attention at a company called Strange Fruit PR. The words Strange Fruit refer to a song about lynchings, where trees in the South 'bear strange fruit', aka dead black men. If we saw a PR company called Holocaust PR or something like "arbeit macht frei" PR (a common sign posted in nazi concentration camps that said "work makes you free") we'd also freak out. Strange Fruit is two years old and it just came to twitter's attention, so it seems out of the blue, but it's just happened now because a critical mass of people found out about it recently. Sometimes it takes a while to build the political momentum to have a conversation on something.

> It's this "us vs. them" victim mentality that's the problem in mainstream America.

Black people in the US have as a group been enslaved, raped, economically enslaved, lynched, raped, denied votes, denied education, denied space in the community, denied housing, denied loans (see redlining), ignored, shot by the police, etc for the entire history of America (those where random examples). I don't think it's very human to tell them to ignore the past (and ongoing racism) and that there is no longer a 'us' and a 'them'.

If you disagree I would like to know why you don't think the above applies.

The difference between this and a "witch hunt" is that real witch hunts didn't find a bunch of witches.

http://www.timwise.org/2014/12/we-dont-need-nice-we-need-jus...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thorncoyle/2014/11/an-open-lett...

The quote in question? "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

Even if it was misattributed, it's still one hell of a motto to live by.

Isms will always exist because not all of us are equal and we will never be; and I'm not saying that with a discriminating tone, what I mean is that you have to be completely retarded (excuse me, but it's true) to actually believe and state that we are all the same. We all like different stuff, we all have different ways to achieve our goals, we even have (VERY) different moral foundations to asses whether something should be right or wrong.

On the other hand, most of us are used to live under the terrible premise to puts oneself (and thus, its kind) before others. Put these two facts together and everything that has happened (and will continue to happen) throughout our history becomes obvious.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/how-eins...

http://qz.com/250701/12-things-white-people-can-do-now-becau...

And I think this article is really helpful for perspective:

http://www.timwise.org/2014/12/we-dont-need-nice-we-need-jus...

It's hard to take the rest of what he says seriously with all that baggage..

There is no scientific definition of "white", it is a social construct that has changed to be more inclusive as various groups integrated into American society.

I think Bacon (both Roger and Francis) also used thought experiments to great effect.