Breaking the American Stereotypes

The people who help us, we're grateful to them, but I wish they wouldn't keep on telling us how sorry they are for us, how bad we have it. And I wish their eyes wouldn't pop out every time they see we're not crying all day long and running wild or something. The other day a white fellow, he said how wonderful my home is, and how good we get along together, and how impressed he was by it all. I wanted to say, 'Don't be giving us that kind of compliment, because it shows on you what you don't know about us.'

--Mississippi black man

to Psychiatrist Robert Coles

ACROSS the U.S., there are 25 million impoverished, deprived and misunderstood Americans, black and white, who like that Mississippian are generally scorned, patronized and looked upon as psychologically sick and morally deficient. Yet to Harvard Child Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who knows these forgotten citizens--and their children--far better than most Americans do, that stereotype is dead wrong. After more than a decade of studying and living with sharecroppers, migrants, mountaineers, poor blacks and working-class whites, Coles has concluded that most are astonishingly healthy in mind and remarkably courageous in spirit. He believes that they possess unrecognized strengths that, if properly understood, bode well for the future of the nation.

In a passionate effort to get that message across to an America beset with more suffering and social unrest than at any time since the Great Depression, Coles has in the past dozen years poured his insights into 13 books and 350 articles. His most recent books, just published, are Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers and The South Goes North (Atlantic-Little, Brown), the first about poverty in rural backwaters, the second about destitution in urban slums. They are part of a multi-volume work called Children of Crisis, a long-term study that began in 1967 with a book about the effects of Southern integration and will continue in 1975 with a report to be called Chicanos, Eskimos and Indians.

This prodigious output has already established Coles, 42, as the most influential living psychiatrist in the U.S. Black Psychologist Kenneth Clark says that Coles' quiet presence on the national scene "keeps morality, decency and justice alive." Leon Eisenberg, director of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, believes that Coles' work is an "effective prod to the social conscience of other psychiatrists."

Coles' accomplishments are perhaps best summarized by Harvard Social Scientist David Riesman: "There is one important theme he has contributed: antistereotype. Policemen are not pigs, white Southerners are not rednecks, and blacks are not all suffering in exotic misery. What he is saying is 'People are more complicated, more varied, more interesting, have more resiliency and more survivability than you might think. I listen to them! You listen to them! Please listen! Again and again!' "

By rising above the set prejudices of both liberals and conservatives, Coles helps depolarize a divided society. He has performed one of the most difficult and important feats of all: to criticize America and yet to love it, to lament the nation's weakness-es--its "greedy, monopolistic, avaricious and sordid sides"--while continuing to cherish its strengths. Most important, he avoids the sterile dogma of social science and speaks, unashamedly, from his heart.

Coles' influence reaches beyond his profession and beyond the academic and intellectual communities. After reading a Coles article called "Black Lung: Mining as a Way of Death," for example, a fuel company executive set up a new health plan for workers in the West Virginia and Pennsylvania mines he controls. In Washington, Coles is of ten consulted by powerful Congressmen of both parties. His testimony helped to launch the hunger crusade in the South in 1967 and to keep the migrant health program going when it was about to die in Congress two years ago.

Psychiatrist Coles has more to say than the obvious, that the hungry must be fed and the sick cared for. His most telling message is that the nation cannot help the "children of crisis" unless it understands them, and it cannot understand without discarding stereo- types. "We categorize people, call them names like 'culturally disadvantaged' or 'white racists,' names that say some thing all right but not enough--be-cause those declared 'culturally disadvantaged' so often are at the same time shrewd, sensitive and in possession of their own culture, just as those called 'white racists' have other sides to themselves, can be generous and decent, can take note of and be responsive to the black man's situation."

An end to stereotyping could have practical effects on Government efforts to aid the poor, because, as Coles sees it, shallow labels lead to shallow programs, or no programs at all. If, for example, Appalachia's poverty is attributed to the mountaineers' "backwardness" and "suspiciousness," efforts to help are bound to be misdirected--and thus bound to fail. If deprived people are thought to have no values worth preserving, then they will continue to be treated with condescension. As one ghetto woman complained to Coles: "They tell you they want to help you, but if you ask me they want to make you into them and leave you without a cent of yourself to hang on to." Finally, as long as the poor are considered incapable of constructive effort in their own behalf, programs to help them will be confined largely to welfare handouts. Coles is convinced that handouts alone are no help and eloquently pleads for an alternative plan: to bring all deprived groups into the mainstream of society, not as passive recipients of governmental largesse but as active molders of their own lives.

You mean you want to learn about us, so then you can be our friend, and you'll go and tell other people to be our friend, because you'll tell them they should be.

--Seven-year-old child

That youngster, quoted in Children of Crisis, clearly understood the task Coles set for himself years ago. In order to learn about such children and their parents, to find out what they feared, what they cared about and "what it meant to them to deal with their particular world," Coles went to live among them. Day after day for years, he visited the same families, talking with them at home, in schools and on the streets. Once he rode a bus for a whole year with black youngsters going to school outside the ghetto.

At first it was hard to get close to people. "The families were very silent, and they just stared," Coles remembers. But his own shyness proved disarming. In the first volume of the Children series, he describes one visit to a poor family: "There were no chairs. We stood there, shuffling and anxious. Finally I told them of my nervousness and asked if I might sit on the floor. I started telling them about myself, my life and my interests." When he stopped, the black mother patted his knee and said, "We will pray for you and make a way for you."

In that family, as with all those he has visited. Coles got the youngsters to reveal themselves by asking them to draw with the crayons he carries everywhere; to one child, he became not Dr. Coles but the Crayon Man. He has taped hundreds of hours of conversation to study at home and to reproduce in his books, and he has tried to learn about people not only from their words but from "a nuance, a gesture, a way of looking." He takes photographs, too. "to hold near me and help guide my mind (and I hope my heart) a little nearer to the essence of particular lives."

I have a few things that are mine--the comb, the rabbit's tail my daddy gave me before he died . . . I had a luck bracelet, but I left it some place.

--Migrant child

Luck itself is alien to the children --and adults--of Migrants. Sharecroppers, Mountaineers. Writing about the migrant way of life along the Atlantic seaboard from southern Florida to northern New York, Coles reminds his readers that "even many animals define themselves by where they live, yet we have thousands [some 300,000] of boys and girls who live utterly uprooted lives, who wander the American earth, who even as children enable us to eat by harvesting our crops but who never can think of any place as home."

Although they are without homes, migrant children in their earliest years are "quick, animated--tenacious of life." This does not last long, for hunger, disease and despair soon take their toll. "Migrant parents and even migrant children do indeed become what some of their harshest critics call them: listless, apathetic, hard to understand, disorderly, subject to outbursts of self-injury and destructive violence toward others."

Perhaps this is because the migrants see no way out of their death-in-life existence. Virtual captives, those who try to escape their peonage are sometimes arrested on trumped-up charges by law officers sympathetic to the farmers. Paid little or nothing in cash on the grounds that their wages are actually owed their bosses for transportation and for the miserable food and shelter they supply, migrants have no money for flight. As one worker trapped in a cycle of alleged indebtedness said, "If you're born on the road, you'll most likely have to stay with it; they're not going to let go of you, the crew leader and the sheriff and like that."

To an outside observer who is caught in his own trap--the habit of stereotyped thinking--migrants are immobilized by their despair. In fact, as Coles repeatedly demonstrates, most of them never give up ar,d so could respond to help if only it were offered. "There's no point to feeling sorry for yourself, or else you want to go and die by the side of the road," one migrant woman told Coles. "Some day that will happen," she said, "but there's no point in making it happen sooner rather than later."

I know it's not so good for us, but there's never a day I don't see something I like.

--Jeannette, a sharecropper's child

Considering her privations, Jeannette's capacity for joy is miraculous. Coles calls the offspring of the South's mostly black tenant farmers "stranded children," because they are geographically isolated (some spend their whole lives within a five-mile radius) and psychologically resigned. "I don't know why we're still here, but we are; and I guess we always will be," a mother told Coles.

Both parents and children live in virtual bondage to a hierarchy of "boss-men." They are also at the mercy of another stereotype-ridden group, their children's teachers, who often show contempt for their pupils. Reported one child: "The teacher just has us make pictures. She told us we'll be hopeless on the rest of the lessons --the writing and numbers--so maybe we should just wear the crayons down every day."

Despite such insensitive treatment, sharecropper children can grow up to be warm parents. "Sometimes a child of mine, she's hurting, and I know she needs something I can't give her," a mother confided. "And I'll tell her that if she hasn't got anything--nothing to wear, and the sicknesses, and the food that isn't what she should be having--then even so there's me, and I'll never leave my children, never."

Just as such love sustains the stranded children, so love of the land nourishes their fathers--and prevents them from trying a new life somewhere else: "You may find yourself a job with good money, but you'll pine for it here. The real worst of it would be knowing that the land is just lying out there, not being asked to do anything, not coming up with the shoots."

How could I sleep, away from that hill over there?

--Paul Evans,

West Virginia mountaineer

Among the mountain people Coles came to know in Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia, attachment to the land is even deeper than among tenant farmers. Though isolated from the rest of the country in the hollows of Appalachia, mountaineers at least live on ground that is theirs and so have more to offer their children than migrants or sharecroppers--more of a history, and more "to own and occupy and defend."

As one mountaineer expressed it, "Over in Korea, my buddies would always be asking me why I was more homesick than everyone in the whole Army put together. I told them we have the best people in the world here. We take care of each other, and we've been here from as far back almost as the country, and we know every inch of the hollow, and it's the greatest place in the world, with the hills and the streams and the fish you can get."

But what of the stereotyped idea that mountain people are uninterested in education and apathetic about corruption? The hidden people themselves gave Coles some answers. Because work is hard to find, they explained, there is little to gain by going to school, and there is a lot to lose by challenging dishonest officials who control what few jobs there are. As for the "suspicious" label, one mountaineer, at least, accepted it readily. "The coal people come in, and they're tearing up everything they can get their hands on, and then the next thing they're gone and all we have for it is a landslide. If you don't get suspicious, you're not right in your head." Coles agrees: "Why don't we call them 'realistic,' which means plain and simple smart about their world?"

Up here in the city, there's no one paying us any attention, none at all.

--Mountain-born youth in Cleveland

That adolescent is typical of the displaced Southerners, both black and white, about whom Coles writes in the second of his new books, The South Goes North. Four times Coles watched black Alabama and Mississippi families "slip away from the plantation or cabin and drive off with a look of relief and bitter joy and regret and sadness and triumph." Three times he went along with white families from West Virginia when they moved to Chicago, staying to observe the "settling in" process. But much of his time for six years was spent in regularly visiting ten white families in a working-class section of Boston and ten black ones in its black ghetto, Roxbury.

There, Coles found that the widely held conception of black families as inevitably disorganized simply does not stand up. Among middle-class blacks, he reports, the typical family is "much like the Yankee Victorian kind--very strict, very concerned with getting ahead." In his study of Northern blacks, Coles makes other stereotype-breaking observations. He reports, for example, that lower-class blacks have family structures similar to prosperous suburbanites; in both cases the father is away from home much of the time, and his absence is not necessarily any more damaging to the black child than to the white.

Black mothers can be as effective at child rearing as any mothers anywhere. Their youngsters are frequently quite unlike the lost, emotionally sick children described in psychiatric journals; many "have a flesh-and-blood loyalty to one another, a disarming code of honor, a sharp, critical eye for the fake and the pretentious." Confessed one elementary-school teacher: "That was the hardest thing for me to realize--that a ghetto child isn't a hopeless case or already a delinquent when he comes into the first grade."

Later, Coles admits, things can change. "The world's restrictions become decisive antagonists to the boy or girl--saying 'no' to them about everything, teaching them to transform those refusals into a judgment of their worth as individuals and as citizens." The point is eloquently put by one mother: "I don't know how to keep my kids from getting stained and ruined by everything outside. They are alive, and then they quit. I can tell it by their walk and how they look. They slow down and get so tired in their face, and they get all full of hate."

If Whitey really wanted us to make the scene, he'd clue us in that he did, and brother, we'd get the message. Right now, I think he's kidding us.

--Black youth in Chicago

Obviously, blacks have their own stereotypes about whites. Coles believes that busing is one way to break those stereotypes. Speaking of his white classmates, a black youngster recognized that "they're not our enemy. Some of them are, but a lot are no different than a lot of us are." Coles says that busing also builds a black child's confidence, and his young acquaintances prove him right: "It took the bus to bring us into the white man's world --and that's the world if you live in America."

It is a hard world, however, when there are no jobs. "Why don't they fix the country up so people can work, instead of patching up with this and that and giving us a few dollars?" a ghetto mother wanted to know. Coles himself fully recognizes the hazards of joblessness; lacking the inner controls that people develop only when they work "with skill, pride and hope," idle blacks can easily turn to violence. The wonder is that it does not happen more often. Writes Coles: "Today's protesting black youths, despite their supposed lack of 'civilization,' are much more controlled than their 19th century counterparts in Western Europe."

They may also be more despairing, as a ghetto youth called Peter revealed in a drawing he made for Coles. With a black crayon, he traced circles within circles. In the black center of them all, he inscribed an X, and all around the picture he drew the shattered parts of a human body: two faces, an arm and five legs. A stunned Coles listened in silence to Peter's explanation: "It's that hole we dug in the alley. If you fall into it, you can't get out. You die."

There's always someone trying to make us out as dumb people, as simple as can be.

--Mountaineer in the North

When men and women from Appalachia come up to the cities, the problems they face are not so different from those that confront transplanted blacks. As they soon find out, a man's skill, in itself, counts for nothing: "If you have only your strong arms, it's no good. I can build a house, but I didn't have the references they wanted." There are problems with unskilled jobs, too. "They'll say you spend too many minutes trying to be perfect. I had a job washing cars, but the man said I cleaned each car like it was my own."

Mountaineers do not look to welfare as a solution. "I can tell my wife to say I've deserted her, and she'll get money from the city, but I couldn't swallow my pride that way. My wife says she tried to say it, just to herself, and she broke down and cried." All the same, the mountaineers don't want pity and resent "the liberal types" who "love having a man like me to feel sorry for." In the end, they suffer--or go home, like the mountaineer who left Cleveland for his beloved McVeigh, Ky., explaining that he'd "sooner die hungry than spend his last few years in the places where the mountains are gone."

It's sweet pain this time, because however they try to hurt me, I know that just by sticking it out I'm going to help end the whole system of segregation; and that can make you go through anything.

--Black student in a white school

Coles recorded that remarkably courageous statement in his earliest study of stereotypes, the first volume of Children of Crisis, about blacks and whites caught up in the battle over Southern desegregation. Both groups, he found, were more flexible than outsiders imagined.

Ruby Bridges, only six, was one of those who seemed able to go through anything--as Coles found out when he went along on the first day of enforced integration in 1960 and watched her brave mobs and their profanity to enter an all-white school. By the time that day came, Coles had known Ruby for several weeks, partly through her crayon pictures. Whenever she drew white children, they came out taller than she, whatever their height in real life. Her white children had carefully drawn features and the right number of fingers and toes, while she pictured herself as lacking an eye, or perhaps an ear or an arm. "When I draw a white girl," she explained, "I know she'll be O.K., but with the blacks it's not so O.K." All the same, Ruby herself was O.K.; her strength, Coles discovered, came from her "intact and supporting home."

As for white youngsters in school with blacks for the first time, many managed to acquire "new ideas, new assumptions and new expectations," even when their parents were violently opposed to integration. Admitted one white youth: "You can't help having respect for them, the way they've gone through the year so well."

Who can agree with himself all the time?

--A white machinist

From Southern segregationists Coles turned to some Northerners who are often as hostile toward blacks as Southerners. In The Middle Americans, published last year, Coles describes the policemen, firemen, bank tellers, typists, storekeepers, telephone repairmen and others who make up the nation's working class. Using words like backlash, ethnic blocs, bigots or hardhats to characterize these men and women turns millions of people into "them," Coles believes, creating "one more 'group' to be pitied or exploited or scorned." Each Middle American wants to be judged on his own merits, as an officer of the law complained with great clarity: "Why does everyone say the police? There are thousands and thousands of policemen, and they're individuals--good and bad and not-so-good and not-so-bad."

Most of the police, as well as the Irish, the Italians and the Polish, nonetheless feel that everyone is prejudiced against them and that no one listens. But Coles, as always, did listen. One thing he heard was angry criticism of "the radicals," "the peace crowd" who "don't really love this country," "the snob-students" and "the professors, the big-brain types who look down on the rest of us." The Middle Americans resent being scorned: "I'm as much of a person as anybody, even if I don't talk a lot of big words."

They are resentful of other things, too. Said the wife of a gas station owner: "What bothers me is that we keep doing the best we can, but we're not sure others are doing the best they can." "Others" are mostly blacks, who, as Coles was among the first to point out, seem to threaten the hard-won status and economic gains of the working class. But the Middle Americans are also ambivalent. One moment, the stereotyped language pours out offensively; then prejudice gives way to sympathy. Railed a factory worker: "I get sick and tired of the niggers, always pushing, pushing. But who really is in charge of this country, who is raking in the money? Not the poor colored people, it's not them. What have they got for themselves out of this country, for all the damn backbreaking work they've done since they got picked up in Africa by guys with guns and sent over here like cattle?"

But understanding is not always characteristic of the Middle Americans. Asked, as he often is, why he spends so much time with what some of his liberal friends call these "awful, vulgar, reactionary people," Coles answers, "I don't look upon them as good or bad. I look upon them as human beings, strong and sensible, weak and full of faults." He acknowledges "the blindness, the distortions, the racism, the meanness" among them, but he believes many of the same qualities are to be found in all groups. Besides, he feels special sympathy for working people because it is they who must bear the brunt of change in American society.

There may be a more personal reason: Philip Coles, his father, is a conservative. While the younger Coles reacted against his father's politics--he preferred Robert Kennedy to Robert Taft--he admits that some of the elder Coles' outlook rubbed off on him. "I do have a streak of conservatism; it's one of the ambiguities about me. And I'm not ashamed of it."

Philip Coles was a Yorkshireman who came to the U.S. as a young man and studied engineering at M.I.T. He and his wife, Sandra Young, an Iowa farm girl, had two sons: Robert, born in 1929, and William, born in 1931 and now an English professor at the University of Michigan. The family lived a comfortable, bookish and musical life in the Boston suburb of Milton, and both boys were bright enough to go to Boston Latin School and Harvard. Bob Coles was good at tennis and running, led "a pretty active social life" and, he says, was "no more screwed up than a lot of my friends."

From his father, young Bob acquired much more than his tolerance of conservatism. Philip Coles has had a lifelong interest in people different from himself. Though Jewish, he once lived in a Benedictine monastery, and though well educated, he lived for a time among London workingmen. "In a sense, he was a social observer," Robert Coles says. On long walks with Bob, "he'd point out things about the world and about various neighborhoods, and he'd ask, what are people's whole lives like."

The elder Coles also urged his son to "learn to be by yourself." Bob followed that advice. He enjoys life, and his hearty laugh often sounds through his modest Concord, Mass., house. But his brother observes: "He is a predominantly inward person. The whole course of his career is solitary. He is not a joiner, and he is not into the social thing." Bob himself confirms this. "I don't work with anyone except my wife, and that stems from my oneness, or aloneness." That desire for solitary enjoyment extends even to tennis; Coles plays only singles, never doubles. Besides working with his wife, Jane, who comes from a Massachusetts family with a tradition of interest in social issues, Coles spends most of his free time with her and with their three sons. Their favorite recreation: long walks like those Bob Coles used to take with his father.

It may be from his mother that Coles acquired his interest in religion. Unlike her determinedly agnostic husband, Sandra Coles was an ardent Christian, though not committed to any single denomination. Her son is neither quite believing nor quite disbelieving: his friend and mentor Erik Erikson calls him "a very religious man, but not churchy." Coles himself says that his understanding of the poor comes partly from the King James Bible, with "its vision of redemptive possibility living side by side with the possibility for betrayal and tragedy."

Somehow we all must learn to know one another.

--Coles in "Migrants,

Sharecroppers, Mountaineers"

Coles has a philosophical bent too. Philosophers Soeren Kierkegaard and Simone Weil appeal to him for their interest in "everydayness, the everyday movement of people's lives." He admires Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) and William Faulkner--"the real psychologists." Most important to Coles, though, is the late James Agee, whose writing style he consciously imitated in the early 1960s and whose photograph looks down on Coles as he writes. Erikson says that Coles strongly identifies with the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that early portrait of sharecroppers. Both writers, says Erikson, "are part of a tradition going back to John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath." But Coles is unique because he has illuminated that tradition with psychiatric insight.

Coles' interest in psychiatry came late, months after he had finished medical school. There, according to Classmate Paul Davidson, now a Madison, Wis., internist, Coles was obviously out of place. "The humanitarian part was easy for him, but the scientific part gave him trouble." Coles himself laughs over his memory of a time when the great surgeon William E. Adams paused in mid-operation and announced, "Let us all wait while Dr. Coles does his bow knots." Moreover, Coles could never learn to stick needles into babies without being unstrung by their screams. As a result, his doctor-teachers advised him to go into psychoanalysis to find out whether or not he really wanted to be a doctor. He decided that he did, and eventually chose psychiatry as "the most philosophical of the disciplines."

His training in that discipline leaned heavily on psychoanalysis. He still believes that Freud's view of the mind "dominates our way of looking at man's psychological development." He acknowledges his debt to two other psychoanalysts, Anna Freud, who did pioneering studies of the effect of war on children, and Erikson, famous for his papers on Sioux Indian youngsters. So greatly did Erikson impress Coles that he wrote the much lauded, and highly laudatory, biography, Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work, published in 1970. Trying to explain his own influence on Coles, Erikson suggests that

"My approach gave him a different model of a psychoanalyst."

The idea of a new model attracted Coles because he did not care for the old one. An early experience crystallized that feeling. Helping to care for polio victims during the 1955 epidemic in Boston, he noticed that the patients kept talking about how they would soon be well, though they were obviously paralyzed for life. They were using what psychiatrists call "the mechanism of denial." But to Coles, that term really said very little about the patients. "You have to think of what they were facing that made denial valuable rather than psychopathological. Besides, the endurance and the persistence and the courage they showed I could only admire."

Our very acclaim makes us more rigid and querulous.

--Coles in "A Young Psychiatrist Looks at his Profession," 1961

Coles soon began to fear that in psychiatry he would lose "a larger vision of what life is about, that in dwelling too much on the mind, the mind would become abstracted from the body, from the neighborhood, from the society and--again--from the every-dayness." He thought that psychiatry ought to become involved in social issues. He also came to feel that "the Organization Men" in psychiatry spend too much time going to meetings and writing "more articles about less and less" couched in language so "intricate and tedious" that it vanquishes human love, sorrow and temptations. To preserve its humanity, he concluded, psychiatry needs to acknowledge its kinship with theology and art. "We might do well to talk with Reinhold Niebuhr about the 'nature and destiny of man' or with J.D. Salinger about our Holden Caulfields."

Many of Coles' colleagues take issue with his demand for psychiatric reform because it discounts the developments in the field over the past 40 years. No one, however, questions his call for social change, or the magnitude of the task he has set the nation. An end to the stereotyped thinking that stands in the way of sweeping reform still seems far off; the simplicity of labels is reassuring, and ambiguity is disturbing. As one activist in Mississippi told Coles, people "don't want to be troubled by finding anything 'good' in the people they come to save from everything 'bad.' "

But Coles has an abiding faith in his country and its people, and is profoundly hopeful about the future: "America has nurtured a whole tradition of really significant and even radical political activity all during its history. It is a country founded on revolution, on political protest, a country to which, over generations, the poor and exiled have come. It is the world's richest and most powerful nation, so it has not only the potentiality but the immediate possibility for reform."

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