{"id":167,"date":"2026-06-10T09:41:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T09:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=167"},"modified":"2026-06-10T09:41:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T09:41:02","slug":"a-liberal-without-the-elitism-robert-coles-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"A Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

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 <\/em>was much more than that. He was a liberal without elitism\u2014someone 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\u2019s Democratic Party.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In the early 1980s, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I was mesmerized by Coles\u2019 lectures in his course, \u201cThe Literature of Social Reflection,\u201d in which we read Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, George Orwell, and Flannery O\u2019Connor. Other students and I were particularly taken by Coles\u2019s 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\u2019t Gandhi or King, but a six-year-old.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The course that Coles taught, dubbed \u201cGuilt 101,\u201d was easy for campus cynics to ridicule, but students flocked to it. I well remember the class during which a member of\u202fThe\u202fHarvard Lampoon<\/em>\u202fburst into the room and, as part of an initiation rite, began imitating the professor\u2019s 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, \u201cWe love you, Doc.\u201d Four hundred students jumped to their feet and began to clap furiously.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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, \u201cThere is something going on here that has to do with real class politics.\u201d Kennedy appealed to lower-middle-income whites, Coles told me, because they thought, \u201cThis guy isn\u2019t 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\u2019s for us, too.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201cknew what class they belonged to, and they used that word again and again and again, with much more sociological accuracy than we\u2019re inclined to find in ourselves in this country.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Coles\u2019s 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\u202fThe Middle Americans: Proud and Uncertain, <\/em>in which he wrote empathetically about white factory workers and farmers, whom many liberals had begun to view as reactionary bigots.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s hard to remember now how enthusiastically the city\u2019s liberal elites embraced it. Coles condemned violent resistance by the city\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In an October 1974 interview that ran in The Boston Globe\u202f<\/em>op-ed page, Coles said: \u201cI think the busing is a scandal. I don\u2019t 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.\u201d\u202fColes argued that the \u201cultimate reality is the reality of class \u2026. That\u2019s the real struggle here.\u201d Working-class whites and blacks, he said, have \u201cgotten a raw deal \u2026. Both groups have been ignored. Both of them are looked down upon by the well-to-do white people.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

He took on liberal elites directly. \u201cI don\u2019t think that all these experts \u2026 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 \u2026 until we have been made a part of all of this.\u201d Of people living in wealthy suburbs, he said, \u201cTheir lives are clean and their minds are clean. And they can afford this long, charitable, calm view. And if people don\u2019t know that this is a class privilege, then, by golly, they don\u2019t know anything.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Later, Coles told me that his comments about busing and his empathetic treatment of working-class whites in\u202fThe Middle Americans<\/em>\u202fconstituted the \u201ctwo times in my life when I got into a lot of trouble for what I\u2019ve said.\u201d He continued, \u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2014and commendably so\u2014to try to understand people of different racial backgrounds \u2026 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.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The college-educated white liberals with whom Coles battled in the 1970s are now the Democratic Party\u2019s 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.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I studied with the late Harvard professor Robert Coles, who had a nuanced understanding of class and race in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,25,19,2],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-government","category-in-memoriam","category-newsletter","category-politics","tag-tagged-desegregation-george-wallace-harvard-university-higher-ed-inequaity-lyndon-b-johnson-racism-rfk"],"yoast_head":"\nA Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP\u00a0 - USA Business Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=167\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP\u00a0 - USA Business Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I studied with the late Harvard professor Robert Coles, who had a nuanced understanding of class and race in America.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=167\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"USA Business Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-10T09:41:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/usabusinesschronicle.com\\\/?p=167#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/usabusinesschronicle.com\\\/?p=167\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/usabusinesschronicle.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/b63e0267c8881fa22972f2a01b50d366\"},\"headline\":\"A Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP\u00a0\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-10T09:41:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/usabusinesschronicle.com\\\/?p=167\"},\"wordCount\":1162,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/usabusinesschronicle.com\\\/?p=167#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/usabusinesschronicle.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/891e2146d5f4130059b1961224776864.webp\",\"keywords\":[\"Tagged: desegregation,\u00a0George Wallace,\u00a0Harvard University,\u00a0Higher ed,\u00a0inequaity,\u00a0Lyndon B. 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