A Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP 

Renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who died June 4, is being lauded as a moral giant and a voice of liberal conscience, which he surely was. But the Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis was much more than that. He was a liberal without elitism—someone as concerned with the fate of working-class white people as he was with disadvantaged Black Americans. His life illuminates a better path for today’s Democratic Party. 

In the early 1980s, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I was mesmerized by Coles’ lectures in his course, “The Literature of Social Reflection,” in which we read Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, George Orwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Other students and I were particularly taken by Coles’s moving eyewitness account of school desegregation in the South. Coles lectured about his interactions with a courageous six-year-old Black girl, Ruby Bridges, who helped integrate the New Orleans schools in the face of virulent white hostility. Astonishingly, Coles said, Ruby reacted to taunts and death threats from hateful white segregationists by silently praying for them. The turn-the-other-cheek ethos of Christianity and the power of nonviolent resistance were familiar to all of us cocky undergraduates. But this wasn’t Gandhi or King, but a six-year-old. 

The course that Coles taught, dubbed “Guilt 101,” was easy for campus cynics to ridicule, but students flocked to it. I well remember the class during which a member of The Harvard Lampoon burst into the room and, as part of an initiation rite, began imitating the professor’s intense style of lecturing. Coles asked the student to leave, which he did, and then the scholar stood, in pained silence, clearly distressed. After a few moments, a student yelled out from the back row, “We love you, Doc.” Four hundred students jumped to their feet and began to clap furiously.  

We Harvard students did love him, but he challenged us, not just academically but by confronting the standard liberalism of Harvard students. I learned this during long conversations with him as part of my research for an undergraduate thesis on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Coles served as an informal adviser to RFK and was fascinated, as so many were, by how Kennedy simultaneously connected with Black Americans, who appreciated his passionate support for civil rights, and with working-class whites, some of whom backed Alabama Governor George Wallace for president four years earlier when he made a surprisingly strong but little remembered candidacy against Lyndon B. Johnson in selected Democratic primaries. Kennedy did this by appealing to shared economic interests. Coles told the candidate, “There is something going on here that has to do with real class politics.” Kennedy appealed to lower-middle-income whites, Coles told me, because they thought, “This guy isn’t going to use us to show those rich Harvard-types what a great guy he is [by labeling us as backward]. He may be for them [African Americans], but he’s for us, too.” 

Coles came to his understanding of class naturally. His father was an English immigrant who had been raised in an infamously stratified society, Coles told me, where people “knew what class they belonged to, and they used that word again and again and again, with much more sociological accuracy than we’re inclined to find in ourselves in this country.”  

Coles’s focus on class inequality did not always go over with his fellow Harvard professors, who were more taken by his writing about Ruby Bridges, racial inequality, and white racism. In the early 1970s, Coles published The Middle Americans: Proud and Uncertain, in which he wrote empathetically about white factory workers and farmers, whom many liberals had begun to view as reactionary bigots.  

A few years later, Coles again infuriated liberals when he criticized court-ordered racial desegregation in Boston public schools. Given how disastrous the experiment proved to be, it’s hard to remember now how enthusiastically the city’s liberal elites embraced it. Coles condemned violent resistance by the city’s working-class whites, who hurled bricks at buses and, in one famous photo, poked a flagpole with the stars and stripes at a Black man. But he also said he understood the anger toward affluent white liberals in suburbs like Wellesley and Newton, which were exempt from the desegregation efforts. Rather than seeing desegregation efforts scuttled, he wanted them expanded. 

In an October 1974 interview that ran in The Boston Globe op-ed page, Coles said: “I think the busing is a scandal. I don’t think it should be imposed like this on working-class people exclusively. It should cross these lines and people in the suburbs should share in it.” Coles argued that the “ultimate reality is the reality of class …. That’s the real struggle here.” Working-class whites and blacks, he said, have “gotten a raw deal …. Both groups have been ignored. Both of them are looked down upon by the well-to-do white people.”  

He took on liberal elites directly. “I don’t think that all these experts … these various social scientists and those in favor of integration like myself should be in a position to deliver sermons to the people of Boston … until we have been made a part of all of this.” Of people living in wealthy suburbs, he said, “Their lives are clean and their minds are clean. And they can afford this long, charitable, calm view. And if people don’t know that this is a class privilege, then, by golly, they don’t know anything.”  

Later, Coles told me that his comments about busing and his empathetic treatment of working-class whites in The Middle Americans constituted the “two times in my life when I got into a lot of trouble for what I’ve said.” He continued, “I’ve never heard some of the scorn that can be mobilized against people expressed so vividly as on both of those occasions from people who take great pains—and commendably so—to try to understand people of different racial backgrounds … The same people can speak about working-class people of their own race with no great charity and often times no great effort at understanding.”  

The college-educated white liberals with whom Coles battled in the 1970s are now the Democratic Party’s base. With rare exceptions like St. Louis, affluent suburbs have become as blue as can be. And disaffected working-class whites went from being Nixon Democrats to Reagan Democrats to simply Republicans and Trump supporters (dropping the reference to Democrats at all.)  

How much better would the country be if affluent white liberals could follow the lead of Robert Coles and find an equal place in their hearts for Ruby Bridges and the struggling white workers who also deserve a better life?  

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