Robert Coles on Activism

The interview that follows deals obliquely with one of the great sources of frustration for social activists: How can you support and work for people you do not--even if you want to--genuinely know? On what terms can a Harvard intellectual learn to know a sharecropper in Mississippi, or a Roxbury mother on welfare?

More specifically, it is an interview with Robert Coles, Research Psychiatrist for University Health Services, who as a writer and psychiatrist has since 1958 gotten to know the lives of sharecropper families in the South, of mountain families in Appalachia, and of ghetto families in Roxbury.

Coles has developed loyalties to two communities which are in many ways alienated from each other--academia and the poor. This dual loyalty puts Coles in a somewhat anomalous position. His personal and immediate contact with the poor families he studies leaves him critical of attitudes toward the poor held widely in the liberal-radical community he belongs to.

Activism from Isolation

Coles cites SDS' response to riot-control in Roxbury last March as an example of activist thinking spawned in academic isolation. SDS at the time demanded that police--as enforcers of a repressive status quo--be withdrawn from Roxbury. Coles sharply criticized SDS for taking an ideological stance toward an immediate problem, for ignoring the plight of Negroes "whose houses are being gutted, whose children are being killed."

COLES: I've had reservations about what I said afterwards, not because I disagreed with anything I said, but because I know there are people who will use what I said irrelevantly to try to crush legitimate dissent on the part of students who want to be allied with the poor, but who I am afraid are not allied with them--not allied with them because they have yet to understand the terrible ambiguities that poor people face living in America today, whether they be black or white.

I hasten to add that my cameraderie, my sense of belonging, is with the aspirations of the students who level these charges. I'm certainly not opposed to the kind of social analysis they have made. But I am against a kind of short-circuited thinking that says because we know that the police are trying to enforce a certain kind of status quo, the solution is to get rid of the police--where? --in Roxbury, where the police, God knows, are needed all the time by the very poor people the students and I presumably want to help.

I think that students, and people like me, are terribly isolated from the very people we claim we want to help. Students want more money in the welfare program, they want better housing and more jobs for these people, but they don't know the people, but they don't see life the way people do in Roxbury--people who, regardless of our explanations of American society, have to contend with that society rather than analyze it, who do not have the luxury of long-range historical and social critiques.

They Want To Get In

The people in Roxbury--regardless of what the leaders of SDS or I have to think about it--want to get into the system rather than leave it. The families I work with want to be able to get better service at the Boston City Hospital, they want garbage collection more frequently, they want better heating, they want welfare workers who will help them out. They are not going to take to the streets in order to storm the Winter Palace--there is no Winter Palace to storm.

Many of the students in this country are ideological leaders in search of a proletariat--a black proletariat, a white proletariat, any kind of proletariat. And they can't find it, because what they're looking for doesn't exist. They've found the proletariat in theory, they've found it in their textbooks, they've found it by observing it.

But they haven't found it in the sense of being able to work with the proletariat, of being in a genuine emphatic and responsive relationship to the proletariat -- if there is such a thing as the proletariat as they think of it. I have to quality here, too, because one of the most frustrating and significant things in American life is that even in the worst parts of this country, there is just enough to prevent starvaiton, just enough to provide for malnutrition rather than starvation.

Now whether one approves of this kind of ambiguity in American life or not, it exists. I think some of the people who make an analysis of this society in terms of who owns stock in this or that institution, are not taking into consideration just how complicated and disarming American society is--by disarming I mean anti-ideological in its frustrating complexity.

Police Caught in Middle

I don't think the object of criticism ought to be the policeman. The police are caught in the middle, between those who rise up, often without any purpose in mind other than the moment's rage, and on the other side the white intellectuals who often put the blame on the police rather than on more fundamental things that are responsible for the police action--action which is often, in the existential moment, absolutely necessary. I would aim criticism at people of far greater influence, people with a lot more power and social respect and status, a lot more money and--ironically--a lot more willingness to be flexible.

QUESTION: Political leadership, in other words, is capable of working with the poor community?

COLES: I find that people like Kevin White and Bobby Kennedy can reach across and obtain the alliance of both poor Negroes and poor whites. But not that of the intellectual community. Students are ready to jump on Kevin White without comprehending the enormously complicated job this man has got. Boston is a city that voted 47 per cent for Louise Day Hicks. White is trying to deal with the needs of a predominantly lower middle class community which has been led into the same trap the white southerner has been led into, the trap of bigotry as a means of avoiding social and economic realities.

It's curious to me that I can find support for Bobby Kennedy from the poor in Appalachia, where Harry Cardill called him the greatest man since Franklin D. Roosevelt; I can find support for him in lower-middle-class, and particularly so-called backlash regions, in Boston. But again--we have McCarthy. I don't think this is just an idle, irrelevant distinction. It ties in with the estrangement I spoke of between the white upper-middle-class intellectual liberal, and even radical, community, and the very people whose lives they want changed, but changed from the distance of their analysis -- rather than through any real communion, the kind of communion that people like Agee and Simone Weil have talked about, the communion that goes with living with people and being a part of them.

Coles as Anti-Ideological

Coles' effort to adopt the point of view of the people he studies is the effort of a man who concedes he is a "romantic" and who perhaps has a more-than-ordinary admiration for people trying to cope with poverty. Since he began working in the South ten years ago, he has shaped his work around that point of view.

Since 1964, with a foundation grant and an appointment as a research psychiatrist at the Health Services, Coles has been working with the group of parents who first started bussing their children from Roxbury to white schools -- the Boardman Parents Group. He has since extended the study to include other black and white families in Roxbury.

In the following section he evaluates his own outlook and work:

COLES: I am in favor--I want to emphasize this--of a large measure of the social and economic analysis of America that the student radicals have made. But I suppose my loyalties as a person and as a worker are with the immediate lives of the people that I work with, and in that sense I suppose I am not ideological. I want the police to protect these families from fires, from sniping, and I want the children that I know in Roxbury not to be killed by a burning building or by bullets.

I don't recommend this as a political program, and I think this is frankly the limitation of my kind of thinking and my kind of work. I'm neither a political scientist nor a political leader. I'm working with people who are terribly caught up in a country they love--and they do love America, this is not romantic talk--a country they both love and want more from I want these people to have the kinds of lives they want to have. I don't want to impose my idea of the Good Life on them.

QUESTION: Don't you think this view can be paralyzing if you want to eliminate poverty?

COLES: Well, you're right. In the section I taught in Professor Erikson's course a couple of years ago this same theme came up again and again. The students accused me of being anti-ideological and a romantic, and I suppose they're right. My heroes are not the New Left heroes, and this is the problem, I guess. My heroes are Bernanos and Agee and Orwell and Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy--and Reinhold Niebuhr. And I would add within my own profession Erik Erikson and Anna Freud.

Now none of these people have ever stormed a barricade, none of them have ever formulated large-scale political programs. If you look at some of these people politically, you can imagine what emerges. But I don't care. And I suppose I respect the right of someone to say, "You are a frivolous Western liberal who for all your involvement is never fundamentally going to change this society."

Well, here we get into a very complicated issue. We've seen enough in this century to make us suspicious of people like me, but also to make us suspicious of people who say, "You cannot look at particular human beings and their needs when you're out to change society." This latter viewpoint can be used as a rationalization and justification for the most mean and cruel and inhuman political acts imaginable.

Problems of Organized Action

I suppose I'm interested in certain kinds of spiritual changes in life, changes that may be obtainable by any program.

Now, I've been involved in a number of larger social movements--with the Civil Rights movement in the South, with the Appalachian volunteers, with migrant farmers and with groups that have been trying to effect very fundamental changes.

But I'm very worried about the dangers of a kind of political activity that ignores the ironies and ambiguities of life, including political life. And I am worried about the apparently inevitable things that happen to all institutions, the legal calcifications and rigidities that occur in even the most militantly free and flexible of groups once they have obtained power, once they start consolidating themselves and become self-protective. These are problems that I think transcend even the New Left; they're human problems.

I think a lot of these doubts are shared by people in the New Left, shared by a lot of students, but I don't think these people always act on their doubts, and I'm afraid I want them to act on their doubts as well as on their political princlples. I want them to demonstrate some of the tension that goes between humility and arrogance, some of the tension that goes between idealism and pragmatism, some of the tension that goes between pride and self-doubt and a kind of inner agony.

The Irony of Liberal Agonizing

I worry about my own privileged position as someone who is here in this office, and can go back and forth between communities, and can read [T. S. Eliot's] Four Quartets and get something out of them, but who is not struggling for his next week's salary. I think that the criticism that is leveled against people like me is a valid one: We are privileged; if we don't know it, we are living in sin--I use the word sin.

On the other hand, if I try to destroy myself to be like the people I work with, if I shed myself of the privileges that I've had all my life--well, I think that's impossible. If there's anything I've learned about the people I've worked with, I have found that they are perhaps more accepting of my life than I am of it. I think we live with guilt, we live with our Puritan heritage, we live with all of the self-derogation and self-assault that goes with complicated middle-class Western life.

Let me give you an example of the kind of agonizing I am talking about, how unnecessary and irrelevant it is. I happen to drive a sports car. When I first started working in the South ten years ago, I knew that I couldn't go with that sports car into some of these communities because I had decided that that would interfere with my relationship with these people. Well, it took me a long time to feel free enough to get to know some of these children well enough so that they could visit us in our home, and now, of course, I have found that these children love my sports car, and that these children don't begrudge me it, and that these children don't begrudge me a lot of the things that I begrudge myself.

Coles, dissatisfied with children's books that "abusively romanticize" real experience, wrote a children's book this year--Dead End School--depicting the difficulties faced by two ghetto boys when they are thrust into a desegregation effort. The boys, Larry and Jim, are modeled after two boys Coles got to know in Roxbury. The story gives Jim's view of his own experience in the bussing crisis. Larry peripherally presents a black militant reaction to that same experience.

Coles comments on the difficulty of communicating social complexities to children:

COLES: The book was described by one critic as "well-scrubbed." It was meant to be a compliment, but it's a terribly accurate and I think just criticism of the book. Those children emerge as well-scrubbed because I couldn't use some of the swear words I would have liked to.

As it is, the book is not the usual children's book, and I'm afraid it isn't going to be overwhelmingly received by a lot of conventionally minded guardians of children's literature.

Reach the Children

I meant this book to reach middle-class white children. I wasn't really trying to describe Negro children or their view of the world. I wanted to describe through the activities of children how some of these confusing social and political events occur, what gets them going, how ambiguous and tentative and accidental a lot of them are.

The real challenge that I failed to make in writing that book was the challenge of writing it from the point of view of Larry rather than Jim, of conveying Larry's life to middle-class children--Larry being the boy who came from a much more disorganized home, really a black militant. But it's difficult anyway to communicate these lives to other lives that are so different, and so I chose the easier way out, I chose the black boy who is more like white middle-class boys.

QUESTION: Do you think middle-class children are receptive to social themes, or to lives so far outside their experience?

COLES: I know that this book will not be the easiest book for a lot of children to read, but I think it will get things going in their mind, even if they don't really totally comprehend everything that I had in mind when I was writing it--that it as least a beginning.

I've written another children's book--on another complicated subject, marijuana; and this is directed at junior high children. I think after this I'm going to stop for awhile, because these are such complicated subjects to write about for young people. They require more sweat from me than anything else I've done.S-