Why we should listen to Robert Coles — and to each other
The influential psychologist spent his life listening to children and their parents, particularly during moments of trauma or crisis. And he urged the rest of us to listen, too.
In the spring of 1983, my wife graduated from Williams College. We weren’t married — yet — but I was already in love with her. So I was in the audience on a warm May morning to watch her receive her diploma.
That’s also where I first encountered Robert Coles.
Coles, who died June 4, was the commencement speaker. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know anything about Coles, perhaps the most influential psychiatrist in modern America. But as soon as he started talking, I was transfixed.
He spent his life listening to children and their parents, particularly during moments of trauma or crisis. And he urged the rest of us to listen, too.
When you listen closely, Coles discovered, every individual you meet becomes exactly that: an individual. They’re no longer a category or a caricature. They’re a human being, trying to make sense of the world. Just like you, and like me.
That’s why Time magazine, in a 1972 cover story about Coles, congratulated him for “breaking the American stereotypes.” Wherever Coles looked, he saw people distorting — and demeaning — each other. The only antidote for that was conversation, which would “depolarize a divided society” (Time predicted) by allowing us to recognize the humanity in everyone.
It’s easy to assume we have lost that spirit in America, which seems even more divided than it was a half-century ago. You can hear it in our heated political rhetoric, so full of anger and recrimination. She supports Democrats, so she’s a libtard. He votes Republican? Must be a fascist.
But Coles reminded us that we can move beyond the vituperation and name-calling. Show compassion and curiosity toward everyone, he insisted. And listen to them before you judge them.
Coles was best known for his interviews with Black children like Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old girl who faced a mob of white racists in 1960 while integrating an elementary school in New Orleans. But he also warned against imagining Black people as noble victims, or Southern whites — including opponents of integration — as ignorant bigots.
“Policemen are not pigs, white Southerners are not rednecks, and Blacks are not all suffering in exotic misery,” his Harvard colleague David Riesman told Time, summarizing Coles’ approach. “What he is saying is ‘People are more complicated, more varied, more interesting, have more resiliency and more survivability than you might think.’”
Coles’ conversations with poor and right-wing whites confused his liberal friends, who wondered why he would spend so much time with “awful, vulgar, reactionary people,” Coles noted. The reason was both simple and profound: He wanted to understand them.
Coles reminded us that we can move beyond the vituperation and name-calling.
“I don’t look upon them as good or bad,” Coles explained. “I look upon them as human beings, strong and sensible, weak and full of faults.” He readily acknowledged “the blindness, the distortions, the racism, the meanness” among them. But he refused to reduce them to that.
You could find the same negative qualities in any group, Coles insisted. And working people “bore the brunt of change in American society,” he added. Dismissing them as racist was itself an unjust act, committed by people who imagined themselves as agents of social justice.
In academia, meanwhile, these same tribunes of justice often wrote in impenetrable jargon that only their fellow professors could understand. Coles didn’t do that, either. He used ordinary language, just like the people he interviewed.
That spawned skepticism among some of Coles’ colleagues, who disparaged him as “unscientific” or — heaven forbid — a “popularizer.” But what’s the point of writing something that nobody — other than a small set of specialists — will ever read?
Coles made a difference in the world precisely because his work was accessible to so many people. At the Williams graduation, he told us Bridges had been moving her lips as she walked past the mob protesting her for desegregating an all-white school. Later, Coles asked her what she had been saying.
“I was talking for God and praying for the people in the street,” she replied. “I always pray the same thing. ‘Please, dear God, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.’”
Bridges’ courage and compassion inspired Norman Rockwell’s famous painting, The Problem We All Live With, which appeared on the cover of Look magazine in 1964. And it inspired Coles to spend his life talking to people about how they experienced the challenges and contradictions of their world. In over 50 books and hundreds of articles, he taught us that everyone — especially children — had something important to say.
We just have to listen to them. And, I hope, to Robert Coles.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools.”
