Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

"But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?"

"There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule."

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html

edit - mind you, he also had a tendency to write stuff like: "If a woman looks at a highly polished mirror during the menstrual period, the surface of the mirror becomes like a blood shot cloud", so it isn't as though the slavery thing is a small unfortunate oversight in some otherwise wise philosophy. If you forget for a minute that you are dealing with Aristotle, he is consistently quite considerably bonkers, and seemingly just winging it through a lot of his writing, though there is plenty of genius in there as well.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, drugs, guns, taxes, war, spying, all of it are just distractions because whether the issue goes left or right won't matter to most people. What really matters is whether or not people can feed their children, have a roof over their heads, have something meaningful to do with their time, be warm in the winter, be free from violence. These are the things that matter, but we're all caught up in bikeshedding over how to get there.

And in the process, a very small group of people get to come in and unilaterally take action to fill their own pockets. Everything else that happens is the rest of us playing Lord of the Flies.

Isms will end when the majority takes up the cause of the minority, because in actuality, it's their/our cause, too.

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.

I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception.

Although it has clear political implications, the last part of the quote-within-a-quote ("They are not our equals…") is a scientific hypothesis. Does it strike you that people who take the opposite view of Einstein's—or who even consider its possibility—are treated as merely mistaken? As suffering from a misconception? No—they are treated with opprobrium, condemned with epithets (racist, fascist, etc.), and purged from civil society.

No reasonable person denies that the ancestors of slaves were mistreated, but as an explanation for group differences this is not mutually exclusive with cultural or biological factors that may have nothing to do with past oppression. Unfortunately, this subject is not treated as a scientific matter—it has become a political fight. Einstein appears to be "ahead of his time" not because of the triumph of his scientific arguments but because his political allies have been consistently advancing.