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 SDS at the time demanded that police--as enforcers of a repressive status quo--be withdrawn from Roxbury.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.