If you’re serious about diversity, back Bernie Sanders.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D — NY).

In an article from about a month ago, I documented at length the propaganda war that the establishment liberal media has waged against Bernie Sanders. As I wrote, a crucial part of this propaganda campaign is the weaponization of identity against Sanders, demonstrated, for example, by a New York Times news piece published on April 20th of this year. The piece was headlined “Should a White Man Be the Face of the Democratic Party in 2020?” A photo of Sanders resided beneath this title. In the article, Sanders is said to be “out of step with ascendant forces in the party today” because of his age, race, and gender.

The not-so-subtle argument in this Times news story is that a victory for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary would be a loss for diversity. This argument is unfortunately fairly prevalent, certainly in establishment media outlets. Thus, I think it’s worth taking the time to debunk it and set the record straight.

The reality is that having Sanders as the leader of the Democratic Party would constitute a huge win for diversity, for two reasons that the Times piece, among many others, fails to mention: (1) Sanders would be the first Jewish president in U.S. history; and (2) Sanders is the leader of the movement transforming the Democratic Party into a younger, more diverse party.

On the first point, Sanders’s Jewish heritage has practically been erased from the mainstream narrative surrounding diversity by constant depictions of him as simply an old, white man. Yet, as Sanders recounted in a Tweet from March 2nd,

My father came to this country from Poland at 17, without a nickel in his pocket. He came to escape the crushing poverty that existed in his community, and to escape widespread anti-Semitism. Virtually his entire family there was wiped out by Nazi barbarism.

That this part of Sanders’s identity goes basically unreported in coverage of the diversity of the Democratic primary field suggests that such coverage is not wholly in good faith.

A recent article from Politico demonstrates this point quite clearly. The piece is titled “Democrats Don’t Want to Nominate a Candidate Who Looks Like Bernie or Joe” and includes a picture of Sanders below the headline. The story dissects polling which shows that Democratic primary voters prefer female and minority candidates, but the first couple of paragraphs are the most relevant as they give the general framing we often see when it comes to the discussion of diversity:

There are now, by our count, two dozen candidates in the race for the Democratic nomination for president, and it’s by far the most diverse field in modern American history. Two are black men; one is a black and Asian American woman; four are white women; there’s a Latino man, an Asian American man, a Pacific Islander woman and a white gay man. And yet, two straight white men lead the polls, and 11 others are in the race, with more joining the field seemingly every week.

Notice that the first paragraph omits anything like: “one is a Jewish man.” Rather, Sanders is included alongside Biden in the description “two straight white men.” In this way, the dominant narrative erases Sanders’s Jewishness in order to cast him as unexciting and more of the same. Erased is the fact that Sanders as the face of the Democratic Party would be, in and of itself, a major win for diversity.

Even more importantly, though, is the second point I outlined above: Sanders is leading a movement that is diversifying the Democratic Party. This movement can broadly be referred to as the progressive movement, which embodies what Sanders envisioned when he called for a “political revolution” during his long-shot bid for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Undoubtedly there was a progressive movement before Sanders’s 2016 campaign, but his campaign made the movement a much more serious force in electoral politics. Two organizations that are part of this movement, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, were founded after Sanders’s campaign and have served as catalysts for the growth of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and for the correlated increase in diversity within the Democratic Party.

Our Revolution, founded in August 2016, is an explicit outgrowth of the Sanders 2016 campaign. Although the organization had something of a rocky start, it has achieved significant successes, not least in the area of diversity. Since 2017, the president of Our Revolution has been Nina Turner, a black, female former Ohio State Senator. In 2016, Our Revolution’s board consisted of a Native American woman, a black woman, two Latina women, two white women, an Arab-American man, a black man, a Jewish man, and two white men. And the board remains similarly diverse today.

Our Revolution-endorsed candidates who won seats in the House of Representatives in 2018 include Raul Grijalva, a Latino man; Tulsi Gabbard, the first American Samoan and Hindu Congresswoman; Ilhan Omar, “the first Somali American, first Muslim refugee and first hijab-wearing Muslim woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives”; Rashida Tlaib, who tied Omar as the first Muslim congresswoman and who is the first Palestinian-American congresswoman; Deb Haaland, “one of [the] first two Native American congresswomen”; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina woman; Veronica Escobar, one of the first two “Latinas from Texas to represent the state in the U.S. House of Representatives”; Pramila Jayapal, “the first Indian-American woman elected to Congress”; and Jamie Raskin, a Jewish man.

Justice Democrats, formed in early 2017 by “[a] group of progressive journalists, former staffers for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’[s] presidential campaign and political organizers,” is less of an explicit outgrowth of Sanders’s 2016 campaign than Our Revolution, but it is still massively influenced by Sanders. It also got off to a rough start but is now thriving under the leadership of Alexandra Rojas, a young woman of color.

Seven Justice Democrats-endorsed candidates won their House races in 2018. Five were also Our Revolution-endorsed: Raul Grijalva, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal. The two not endorsed by Our Revolution were Ro Khanna, an Indian-American man; and Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts’s first black Congresswoman.

Of all of these candidates backed by Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, six were new to Congress in 2019. These organizations thus helped make it possible for “Congress’s incoming class [to be] younger, bluer, and more diverse than ever” in 2019, as Politico reported. And, again, the rise of this diverse slate of legislators is linked to Sanders’s 2016 bid.

Connected to the diversification being pushed by these groups is the diversification of Sanders’s 2020 campaign. As announced in February, Sanders’s campaign co-chairs include “California Rep. Ro Khanna, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Ben Cohen, a co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s.” Ben Cohen, the only white co-chair, is Jewish. And Sanders’s campaign manager is Faiz Shakir, the first Muslim to manage a presidential campaign.

Moreover, as Natalie Gontcharova reported on March 19th,

The [Sanders] campaign says that now, every single one of its teams — management, political, policy, organizing, communications, advance, digital, and fundraising — has women, and predominantly women of color, in leadership positions. Overall, the national leadership team is around 70% women.

A more recent analysis of race and gender composition of senior staff on nine major Democratic campaigns from the Wall Street Journal found that Sanders’s campaign is the third most diverse in terms of race — behind Kamala Harris and Julian Castro — and the second most diverse in terms of gender — behind Castro. Sanders’s senior staff are majority non-white and over 70% female. Expanding on this commitment to diversity, Sanders explicitly stated on the Daily Show a couple months ago, “My cabinet will look like America.”

If you truly care about diversity of representation in the broad sense, rather than diversity narrowly restricted to the identity of the Democratic nominee, there is no better candidate to support than Sanders. With his Jewish heritage, he competes with most other candidates in terms of diversity related to personal identity. Add the diversity of his campaign staff to that inherent in his own identity and it’s clear that he has a campaign vying with several other 2020 campaigns for the award of “most diverse campaign in U.S. history.”

Then we have the diversity within organizations like Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, both importantly inspired by Sanders, and the diversity of the Congresspeople supported by these groups. While other candidates can compete with Sanders in terms of personal and campaign diversity, none of them have catalyzed efforts contributing to the diversification of Congress in the way Sanders has. (Elizabeth Warren, a close ally of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), is Sanders’s only minor competitor in this area. However, her relationship with the PCCC is markedly different than Sanders’s relationship with Our Revolution and Justice Democrats.)

Concern regarding diversity, then, is not a reason to oppose Sanders; it’s a reason to support him. Bernie Sanders may not have fit this title in 2016, but in 2020 he is the diversity candidate.

Update: Ironically, I accidentally left out the Jewish idenity of several of the people described above. The article has been updated to better reflect the identities of these individuals.

Correction: This article mistakenly referred to the 2016 Our Revolution board as the current board. It has been updated to correct this mistake.