Einstein’s opposition to segregation was already well known in some quarters by the time he moved to Princeton. In 1932, W. E. B. Du Bois published a letter from him in The Crisis, one of the nation’s most prominent Black publications, in which the scientist offers the idea that racialized self-hatred, though often imposed by the majority, could be defeated through a communal practice of education and self-empowerment, “so an emancipation of the soul of the minority may be attained.” This was the aim of so much of Einstein’s public political writing: a conscious shift in perception, engineered via collective effort. To me, this seems like an extension of his scientific thinking—a theory of change made to the measure of a human life. In his letter to Du Bois, Einstein’s focal point is the structure of human cognition: how socially sanctioned prejudice corrupts our mental models of the world and ourselves. I don’t think this can be easily separated from his interest in the fundamental workings of motion and time, or his belief that, as he once wrote, the “most beautiful logical theory means nothing in natural science without comparison with the exactest experience.”
Throughout his career, one of Einstein’s core projects was what he called “unified field theory”: a single, elegant framework that would help us better understand the forces giving form and structure to the universe. This pursuit was also representative, I think, of Einstein’s larger political project—his desire to challenge false schemas of perceived difference. These distortions keep us from seeing fundamental truths about the nature of mortal life: that we are irreducibly complex, atoms and air, opaque to one another in ways that demand curiosity rather than surety. In “Geometry and Experience” he writes, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Everything we see, on this plane of perception, is in a state of endless transformation.
Einstein’s commitment to the creation of a new world, through both direct protest and everyday acts of solidarity, is visible in his relationships with artists and freedom fighters such as Paul Robeson, a native son of Princeton, whom he met in 1935 amid a national increase in extrajudicial killings of African Americans. At Robeson’s invitation, Einstein became a co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching. He also wrote a letter to President Harry Truman requesting the passage of a federal anti-lynching law. This sort of political activity eventually made Einstein a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which surveilled him through his final years. At the time of his death, his FBI file was 1,427 pages long.