Albert Einstein was a failure.
I know he’s one of the most important scientists who ever lived. I understand he “reinvented reality” and changed how we understand space, time, gravity, light and almost every form of matter. And when it comes to humanity’s great leaps forward, I’m told Einstein’s E=mc² thing ranks alongside 12-year-old Grand Wizzard Theodore’s achievement in turntablism and the first person to season a chicken wing with lemon and pepper.
But Einstein didn’t think he was a complete success. After winning the Nobel Prize for his life’s work at age 42, the groundbreaking scientist still felt “his theory of general relativity was incomplete.” Because he was still relatively young (see what I did there?), the physicist spent the rest of his life on a quest for something that would elude the greatest minds in history:
A “theory of everything.”
Also known as a “grand unified theory,” it is the holy grail of theoretical physics. It’s basically the algorithm God used to code the universe’s operating system. Although I’m pretty sure that’s correct, maybe physicists R. B. Laughlin and David Pine can explain it better than someone who got a C in calculus II.
“The Theory of Everything is a term for the ultimate theory of the universe,” the scientists explained. “A set of equations capable of describing all phenomena that have been observed, or that will ever be observed.”
See? That’s exactly what I said.
Unfortunately, Einstein never realized his life’s dream. But during his journey, the genius began searching for a solution to another problem that had also confounded some of the best minds in history:
White supremacy.
Four years before Adolph Hitler culturally appropriated America’s Jim Crow statutes as the legal foundation for Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, Einstein wrote an essay for the NAACP’s Crisis magazine condemning America’s treatment of African-Americans. After renouncing his German citizenship, the brilliant physicist moved to the U.S. and barnstormed the U.S. with civil rights leaders. He called Jim Crow a “slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation,” and co-chaired Paul Robeson’s American Crusade Against Lynching. When 500 Tennessee state troopers with submachine guns surrounded a Black neighborhood, Einstein showed up with a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall. He had an entry in J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO files before Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X or the Black Panthers.
“There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States,” Einstein said during a visit to Lincoln University, America’s oldest HBCU. “That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”
But if Einstein’s goal was to make America great, he failed miserably. When he died on April 18, 1955, Rosa Parks was still riding segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala. Martin Luther King Jr. was not yet a doctor. Black people in Selma still could not vote. Emmett Till was planning to try out for the baseball team after he returned from spending the summer in Mississippi.
For one of the most brilliant minds in the history of the world, curing America of anti-Blackness was as impossible a task as explaining everything that ever is, was or will ever be.
Sadly, Albert Einstein is no Donald Trump.
After being censored, called out in an executive order and summoned to the White House to explain his anti-whiteness, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III announced his retirement on Tuesday.
Trump may not be solely responsible for Bunch’s decision to retire. But, as The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables and Janay Kingsberry reported, the president’s unrelenting campaign to erase Black history played a part in his decision to leave, writing:
Trump’s attacks at times seemed to directly target Bunch’s work. Last summer, the president came after the Smithsonian on social media, writing that it focused too much on “how bad Slavery was.” The two later met over lunch at the White House, a conversation that Bunch described as “the most stressful lunch I’ve ever had in my life.”
In a December letter that the administration sent to the Smithsonian, the White House threatened to withhold funding if the museum complex did not comply with an order to send over a trove of documents about its work and comply with its demands to tell an adequately patriotic version of American history. Americans “will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history,” the letter said.
“I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” Bunch told the New York Times, “I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”
Bunch’s act of not-so-quiet quitting followed the resignation of beleaguered Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, who spent months fighting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s discrimination against Black and female service members. Hours after Bunch said “FTSIO,” the American Bar Association declared an end to its rule requiring law schools to take concrete actions toward diversity and inclusion for students, faculty and staff. The ABA changed its rules the day before the Justice Department accused the University of California, Berkeley Law School of discriminating against white and Asian students. The DOJ’s accusation was preceded by a press release from the Treasury Department threatening to revoke the non-profit status of schools that offer aid to non-white students.
On Wednesday, television host Jimmy Kimmel announced that he would air an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on YouTube to avoid pressure from Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr. Trump endorsed Talarico’s opponent a few days before threatening journalist Kirsten Welker with “punishment” for reporting on Trump-endorsed candidates' record of “mixed results.”
While the MAGA purge at the Blacksonian, racial discrimination in the military, law schools abandoning DEI, Black college scholarships and Jimmy Kimmel may seem like separate issues, they are all connected. There is only one reason why the most powerful man in America threatened these disparate people, institutions and organizations:
It worked.
Donald Trump does not pose a theoretical threat to democracy, free speech and Black history. One of the most significant Black historians is leaving his post at one of America's most significant institutions. Stephen Colbert is out, and Jimmy Kimmel is on YouTube. Joy Reid is on Substack. Affirmative action is dead. Colleges are enforcing Trump’s anti-Black rules. Ten percent of the military’s top officers are gone, and no women may be promoted to admiral this year for the first time in a decade. According to the Economics Policy Institute, the rise in Black female unemployment last year was “driven entirely by public-sector losses, with most job losses in federal government.”
He is not trying to turn America into a white supremacist country.
He did it.
Trump’s White Supremacist Theory of Everything
Whether he’s threatening Black servicemembers, a Black history museum, Black congressional districts, Black voters, Black journalists or Black history itself, it’s hard to argue that Trump hasn’t succeeded in redefining America’s political, social and economic universe. The progress he’s made is part of a white supremacist plan to whitewash history that predates the MAGA movement by more than 100 years.
“Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves,” wrote United Daughters of the Confederacy’s “illustrious Southern Historian” Mildred Rutherford in her book A Measuring Rod. “Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.”
This is the American history that white supremacist traitors and their sympathizers envisioned. A century later, Trump is helping them achieve their dream of a pro-white permanent record.
On July 26, 1948, nine days after receiving the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 desegregating the U.S. military. Eighteen days later, more than 6,000 white people gathered in Oklahoma to announce their allegiance to political apartheid.
“We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race,” read the Dixiecrats’ official platform. “We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.”
This is the exact same argument that Hegseth, Trump and this MAGA administration are using. Of course, the Dixiecrats lost…
And now they’re winning.
The threats against the ABA, Berkeley and colleges that consider the historical and current racial disparities are not new. Trump just revived the goals of the Massive Resistance movement that emerged after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated schools. When Trump’s Supreme Court and his DOJ equate affirmative action and DEI with discriminating against whites, they’re resurrecting the argument of their pro-segregation predecessors.
“This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected,” explains the 1956 Southern Manifesto. “It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”
That’s why Hegseth claims he and Trump are eliminating “the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department.” To be fair, when Hegseth has cast his discrimination as “a cleansing of less qualified Black and female candidates,” he was referring to a deep cut by Thomas Jefferson.
“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” Jefferson explained in “Notes on the State of Virginia.” “This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
Their record-setting mass deportations are second only to Operation Wetback. They are attacking Black journalists like it’s 1898 Wilmington, blacklisting “subversive” entertainers like it’s the McCarthy era and reviving racial gerrymandering like they’re ushering in a new era of Jim Crow.
Oh, wait:
They have created a white supremacist theory of everything.
They’re not picking and choosing. They are restoring every atomic particle of the white universe. Their grand unified theory combines white supremacist policies with white nationalist tactics and Christian nationalist doctrines and pro-Confederate ideology and segregationist philosophies and massive resistance and Southern strategies and Redeemer rhetoric and every racist, anti-Black, pro-white thing that is, was and will ever be.
In many ways, how you feel about Trump, his presidency and America itself is predicated on what you consider to be “great.”
If you support traitors who wanted to build a whites supremacist empire, then Donald Trump’s presidency is an unmitigated success. If you dream of a country whose blemishes have been censored from museums and erased from textbooks, then this administration is heaven-sent. If you have ever wanted to live in a nation protected by an all-white warrior force or a land where the color of your skin is included in the equation that determines the weight of your vote, then you are living under one of the best administrations in history.
If you think white supremacy is great, then there is no doubt:
America is great again.
While he never cured racism or solved every mystery in the known universe, Einstein added one more groundbreaking theory to his resume before he died. In 1946, he presented a solution to a theoretical problem that had bedeviled Black America’s greatest minds:
“Why are white people like this?”
After working with Black leaders, writing about discrimination for Black magazines and using his status to fight for equal rights, the card-carrying NAACP member decided to address “a primarily white audience.” While Pageant magazine titled the piece “The Negro Question," anyone familiar with Einstein’s award-winning work understood what he had created:
A Grand Unified Theory of White People.
“[T]here are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the ‘Whites’ toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes,” wrote Einstein, adding:
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. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.
A few months after presenting his hypothesis to white America, Einstein traveled to Lincoln University with W. E. B. Du Bois. Just before the nation’s oldest historically Black university made him an honorary alumnus, Einstein condensed his Theory of Everything White down to one sentence:
“The race problem is a disease of the white people.”
This is the why.
It’s why they must erase our history. It’s the only reason why they gerrymander maps and purge us from the military. It explains the threats and the executive orders and the wars and mass deportation and the Republican Party’s policies and small-government conservatives' obsession with transgender Little League baseball players and pro-lifers supporting genocide and evangelical Christians’ oxymoronic silence.
Donald Trump’s presidency, the MAGA movement's existence and every single thing they do is “the result of their desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”
And they always, always, always lose.
Because we made America great. Because the democracy-makers are worthy and the fascists are not. Because “they are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability.”
Of course, this is just a theory from one of the most brilliant human beings who ever lived.
It took Donald Trump to prove it.
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Excellent piece