Comment by lexcorvus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lexcorvus | Hacker News Reader

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Many a sincere person will answer: "Our attitude towards Negroes is the result of unfavorable experiences which we have had by living side by side with Negroes in this country. They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability."

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.

>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.

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.

It was ever a political fight.

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.

Plenty of people in my family emigrated to the US 1840-1890. They didn't bring any slaves over from Africa. Lots of people emigrated from Scandinavia and Germany/German states in that period.

Don't overestimate the original sin of current white Americans.

I'm not, it was Americans with Europeans with Africans, against the Africans, Irish and Scottish concerned. Besides, the original sin of white Americans is probably either cannibalism, or hanging Quakers. But even after slavery was agreed as wrong, the idea that the freed slaves and their descendent's were actually real people with equal political rights took a very long time to take hold, and has still only had a limited spread.

oh noo the racists will be called racist, such material oppression

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