a-spoon-is-born:

brownbitchbisexual:

I hope Stephen Hawking’s anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics aren’t erased from history, or obscured in our collective remembrance of him. 

I can see it happening. I mean, that’s what they did to Einstein:

But the supposedly otherworldly Einstein, who died 60 years ago, was
also very much a political animal, a man of the left, a social critic,
and human rights activist — facts often erased from the iconic version
of the man.

Einstein was an antinuclear activist, vocal in opposition to
McCarthyism, and, perhaps naturally for someone who escaped the Nazis,
an anti-racist. Not surprisingly, then, he was also the subject of 22
years of surveillance by the national security state, which kept him
away from the Manhattan Project.

In the journal Isis, Fred Jerome
details the sanitizing of the Einstein myth, in which sometimes
controversial positions and statements are often missing from the
popular record. Jerome concentrates on Einstein’s 1946 speech on racism
at Lincoln University.

Einstein typically rejected the many honorary degree invitations he
received, because he thought such things were rather ostentatious and
his age and health made travel difficult. But he made an exception for
this traditionally black university, where he said “the separation of
the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of white
people.” He added, “I do not intend to be quiet about it.”