Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

Sowell has some interesting things to say but it's mixed in with the heavy portion of nonsensical wharrgarbl.. He spends a lot of time calling for the bombing of Iran (so that the US doesn't surrender to them after they nuke us of course), claiming that Obama hates America (going so far as to compare to him to Hitler for creating an oil spill fund), advocating bizarre Federal Reserve conspiracy theories, and all sorts of other strange ideas.

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

Yeah, I think it has more to do with how you're taught to think about people than what you're exposed to.

I grew up in Spokane, WA -- 87% white by demographic survey, 98% people who look white if all you know about race is what you learned in Social Studies in elementary school. :) But what I was dominantly taught about who 'my people' were came from Christianity -- Christ died for everyone. My tribe is humanity. I was not raised to think race was important, and I didn't. That upbringing is with me to this day. I didn't reflexively categorize people by race, and I still don't. It's not something I even notice unless attention is called to it somehow.

Other people from the region were raised differently. The inland pacific northwest is a region that white supremacists like, and we had them.

Growing up in a racial monoculture, you could wind up totally innocent and clueless (like me) or totally racist (like some people I knew of), and probably a lot of other things. It really depended on what you were taught.

The same can happen in diverse cultures, too.

When I moved to Seattle, there was a lot more racial diversity. It still didn't mean anything to me, but it clearly meant things to others, and some people made quite a big deal out of it. I had an amusing conversation with a fellow visiting from the UK about it:

    Him: So . . . what is *with* your black people?
    Me: Excuse me?
    Him: Well, back home, we have black people, too.  
         But . . . they're just regular people.

The racial diversity in Seattle and in the UK did not result in the same attitudes! Of course, there are other 'tribes' over on that side of the world that do matter. But they aren't the same ones as matter over here.

All in all, I think it's not what you're exposed to. It's how you think about it. If you see race, or gender, or religion, or age, or profession, or interests, or lifestyle as what makes someone 'your people', you can't help but have loyalties and opinions about what it means to be in or out of that circle. It doesn't matter if you meet foreigners (by your definition) every day, or once or twice a lifetime.

It's downvoted because it's currently the most serious and rational post on actually solving oppression. Rather than musing abstractly about some dead white scientist talking about blacks. (While taking a break from making money for investors/bosses.)

Speaking of prominent white activist intellectuals, here's Chomsky's view on Einstein: "Compare Russell and Einstein, two leading figures, roughly the same generation. They agreed on the grave dangers facing humanity, but chose different ways to respond. Einstein responded by living a very comfortable life in Princeton and dedicating himself to research that he loved, taking a few moments for an occasional oracular statement. Russell responded by leading demonstrations and getting himself dragged off by the cops, writing extensively on the problems of the day, organizing war crimes trials, etc. The result? Russell was and is reviled and condemned, Einstein is admired as a saint. Should that surprise us? Not at all."

I spent quite a few years in a nearly all-white area when I was growing up.

It was full of folk taking heroin and hitting each other with bottles.

I never could understand where they could muster the energy for so much fighting given the amount of heroin they were on.

Nearly everywhere I have lived since has both been a lot more culturally mixed and a hell of a lot less bat-shit psycho.

This is a fallacy of composition. Luck plays an important role in military success - Napoleon famously said he was less concerned about a general's skill than whether he was lucky - presumably meaning opportunist enough to seize an advantage when one unexpectedly presented itself. Likewise, numbers matter; a sufficiently large army will overwhelm many smaller ones not because of any inferiority of fighting spirit among the defeated, but just by being hopelessly outnumbered. Where small forces has famously resisted larger ones, such as Leonidas' 300 Spartans or the British Army at Rorke's drift, it did so because of the ability to exploit geographical or technological advantages

Your mistake here is to confuse a temporary strategic superiority that confers success in battle or even in war with some sort of moral or intellectual superiority. Back in World War 2 Hitler undoubtedly displayed strategic superiority at first (although the roots of German success go back to the late stages of WW1, when German generals 'banked' some of their military technology within newly Communist Russia, an arrangement which evolved into the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin). But Hitler, like many conquerors before, fell victim to hubris and overreached when he should have consolidated. Despite being a political and military genius, his misplaced assumption of innate racial and cultural superiority (largely adopted from Prussian Kultur) proved to be a strategic weakness.