politics, but it was actually written 50 years ago

by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.

Mr. Bayard Rustin!

Bayard was Martin Luther King’s

collaborator and the chief organizer of the 1963

March on Washington.

“And the right to vote, what do you say?”

Years before Rosa Parks refused

to give up her seat on a bus, Bayard

was arrested and beaten by police

for doing the same thing.

One of 24 times he’d be arrested throughout his life.

In fact, he was arrested right here

at the World’s Fair in New York City

while demonstrating peacefully for equality.

If you've been paying attention, you

may have seen Bayard popping up a bit

this Black History Month.

“Bayard Rustin

than was one of the most important figures.”

“I think that Bayard Rustin is one

of the people who’s kind of almost

criminally under recognized.”

It’s heartening to see Bayard entering

the public consciousness.

“A civil rights

hero was almost erased from history all because

of homophobia.”

But these portrayals mostly focus

on his identity.

“He's black, gay, socialist, pacifist, right?

He’s actually America’s worst nightmare.”

He was openly gay.

He was a socialist.

He was an organizer.

That’s great.

But what’s missing are his actual ideas. And why is that?

Well, his intersectional credentials

fit the spirit of modern activism.

But his ideas? Not so much.

“The problem can never

be stated in terms of black and white.”

The point of Black History Month

is to give a fuller account of history

unflinching and honest.

If we cherry-pick our heroes and then

cherry-pick even smaller parts of their legacy

to match our pre-existing beliefs,

we are merely paying lip service to that mission.

“If a bigot says to me 'the sun is

shinning,' if the sun is shining,

I say yes the sun is shining because I

want to tell the truth.”

I’m a writer and race commentator

and Bayard Rustin holds a special place in my heart.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve

had a seemingly original thought about race relations

only to realize that Bayard beat me to the punch

half a century ago. He opposed affirmative action.

He opposed reparations for slavery,

and he even opposed the concept

of African-American studies as a unique discipline.

Take the recent blackface scandals.

In 1951, Bayard argued against banning

blackface minstrel shows.

He believed that the very existence of minority groups

depends on the freedom of expression and civil liberty.

Imagine that in 2019.

Bayard saw trouble

in the new direction of black activism in the 1960s.

He worried that the movement was prioritizing

divisive displays of righteous anger

over the inclusive coalition-building that

had led to successful civil rights reforms.

Today I see the same divisiveness

on display in the tendency to take

issues that affect Americans of all colors,

whether police violence, criminal justice policy

or education reform, and frame them in exclusively

racial terms.

Bayard's commitment to humanity

over racial politics ensured that he would

be attacked from all sides.

Bayard was a lifelong socialist,

a friend of the labor movement.

Most people associate socialism

with the liberal left, and therefore

progressive racial politics. But Bayard

had true socialist convictions.

“No economic or social order

has ever been developed on the basis of color.

It must be developed on the basis of class,”

which led him to oppose affirmative action and reparations,

instead advocating a federal jobs guarantee, a higher

minimum wage and universal health care.

Bayard criticized another trend that’s on the rise today.

He called it white liberal syndrome.

This syndrome causes white liberals

to expect less from blacks out of a desire

to signal their awareness of racism.

A recent study from the Yale School of Management

found that white liberals use simpler words when

communicating with a person

they assume is black rather than white.

Conservatives, on the other hand, showed no racial bias.

Another symptom of white liberal syndrome?

The belief that white people have no authority

to talk about race issues.

Bayard saw this attitude

as another way in which whites exploited blacks,

not for money or for power in this case,

but for moral absolution. Or as he put it:

A full account of Bayard Rustin

means valorizing him not only as a black man or a gay man,

but also as an intellectual. Reducing Bayard

to an intersectional prop is a symptom

of a much larger problem:

Our failure as a nation to converge around

a set of values that don’t depend

on our own particular identities.

Bayard said it best: