Clark and Panel Agree that Race Defies Reasoning

None of the normal political or social indicators can offer a valid description of American race relations, three psychologists told a Winthrop House audience last night.

Kenneth Clark, Thomas F. Pettigrew, and M. Robert Coles '50, said American race relations were "pathetically irrational."

"I have overwhelming sympathy for lower middle-class whites," Clark, president of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center in New York and professor of Psychology at City College of New York, said last night.

The whites "are in a desperate predicament," Clark said. They have many of the same problems Negroes have, but they cannot join Negro protestors, he said.

Coles, a research psychiatrist for the University Health Services, condemned the political exploitation of the "nostalgia of lower middle-class whites for the days of FDR and the Depression."

"This nostalgia binds them to the black man," Coles said, but the chances for a "grand alliance" of Negroes and poor whites remain slim because the whites think of "law and order as being on their side."

Pettigrew, associate professor of Social Psychology, said that race relations were becoming over-symbolized, especially in terms of "violence" and "Law and Order."

He predicted that "as soon as the war ends," activist Negroes would stop rioting, but warned whites against misinterpreting this.

"What I'm afraid of is that the whites will regard this as an enormous improvement in race relations," he said. This would be a false interpretation, he said, because the riots "are only the outward expression of continuing inner emotions."