Now, that may sound like a criticism of today’s race 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: