Mr. Shanker's guest columnist this week is Msgr. George G. Higgins, Director of the Division of Urban Life of the US Catholic Conference.
Henry Higgins' famous question, "Why can't a woman be like a man?" was thought (even by some women) to be rather funny when it was first put to music in "May Fair Lady." Since the advent of Women's Lib, however, a mere man would have to be rather foolhardy to ask the same question in mixed company. He would be held up to a wrathful scorn (even by his male peers) as an insensitive male chauvinist, and, by today's standards, of course, that's almost as bad as being called a fascist pig. In other words, male bigotry, once so respectable, is now verboten in polite society.
There is another, more elite form a bigotry, however, which is still very respectable and very "chic" in upper and upper-middle class society in this country. Michael Lerner, a young journalist turned political scientist, described it not so long ago as follows: "An extraordinary amount of bigotry on the part if elite, liberal students goes unexamined ... Directed at the lower middle class, it feeds on the unexamined biases of class perspective, the personality predilections of elite radicals and academic disciples that support their views ...
"In general," (Lerner continued) "the bigotry of a lower-middle class policeman toward a ghetto black, or a lower-middle class mayor toward a rioter, is not viewed in the same perspective as the bigotry of an upper-middle class peace matron toward a lower-middle class mayor, or an upper-class university student toward an Italian, a Pole or National Guardsman from Cicero, Illinois - that is, if the latter two cases are called bigotry at all. Yet the two bigotries are very similar.
Lerner says that the hidden liberal-radical bigotry toward the lower-middle class is "stinking and covered" and argues that its consequences are tragic. "Not until the upper-middle class learns to deal with its own hidden bigotry," he concludes, "will it be in a position to help destroy lower-middle class bigotry as well." ("Respectable Bigotry," The American Scholar, Autumn 1969).
During the two years which have elapsed since Lerner wrote the searing indictment of upper class bigotry, the popular media and a number of independent scholars representing a variety of disciplines have, a long last, discovered Middle America and are trying, with mixed results, to find out what the millions of ordinary people who comprise this vast segment of American society are actually like, what they are thinking at the present time, and what it is that really makes them tick. Of the many articles and books which have been written about Middle American during this short period of time, the best, in my opinion, are those which bear the name of Robert Coles.
Antidote to Upper Class Prejudice
Coles is a practicing psychiatrist with a profoundly sensitive social conscience and a wide-ranging grasp of the social sciences. He has spent the better part of the last five years interviewing -- and thereby getting to know and respect and even to love - a generous sampling of middle and lower class Americans. His most recent book, "The Middle Americans," (the text of which is supplemented by a series of excellent photographs by Jon Erikson) is the perfect antidote to the upper class bigotry so severely criticized by Learner in the article referred to above.
Coles does not pretend to have written a scientific sociological study in the technical sense of the word. He and his collaborator, Erikson, look upon themselves "as observers, that alone." Their task has been to see and hear, insofar as they could, "how certain families live, families headed by men who are policemen, firemen, factory workers, bank tellers, or lower-level bank officers, school teachers, telephone repairmen, construction workers, clerics and typists and small farmers and small storekeepers and on and on."
What they have seen and heard has compelled them to realize that any attempt to stereotype Middle American into a single monolithic mold would be tragically wide of the mark.
The aim of their book, then, is to make the "human actuality" of Middle America come across to the reader? In this writer's judgement, they have succeeded in doing so to a remarkable degree. Coles and Erikson, in other words, are totally free of snobbery and self-righteousness. Their purpose "is not to criticize these people (Middle Americans), argue with them, praise them as America's answer to anything and everything, or use them as a means of advancing certain values or purposes we happen to have." They simply accept Middle Americans as fellow human beings with the same mixture of virtue and vice which characterizes every other segment of American society.
It is this quality of humanness - the quality of tolerance and sympathetic understanding - which makes their book required reading for the liberal critics of Middle America. One has the impression, incidentally, that Coles and Erikson wrote their marvelous human book primarily for the instruction of the so-called liberals.
It is their hope that the liberals will not, "in their rush to understand yet another 'problem,' indulge themselves in endless hysterical and foreboding conclusions about the very same people whom, from the other direction, conservatives are likely to see excitedly and not always with reason as their new- found allies and saviors."
This is another way of saying that Middle America, with all its faults and imperfections, deserves better than to be flattered and wooed, on the one hand, by the George Wallaces of this world, and, on the other hand, to be made fun of pharisaical by self-righteous students and intellectuals, who are experts at detecting the moat of bigotry in the eye of the hardhat, for example, but have yet to recognize the beam in their own.