[Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims
the civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But
it was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both
controversial and prophetic today. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RUSTIN THE LIBERAL BIOPIC VERSUS RUSTIN THE LABOR ACTIVIST  
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DUSTIN GUASTELLA
December 1, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims the
civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But it
was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both
controversial and prophetic today. _

Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in Rustin., (Netflix, 2023)

 

_Rustin, _directed by George C. Wolfe and produced by Barack and
Michelle Obama, is largely a retelling of the mythic story of the
civil rights movement but now with the addition of a new character —
Bayard Rustin, played capably by Colman Domingo. Here once again is
Martin Luther King Jr (Aml Ameen) as the savior and singular
embodiment of the movement. The March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom is presented as the apotheosis and catalyst for the triumph of
the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. But in order to seamlessly
fit Rustin into this familiar narrative, the filmmakers depict him as
the long forgotten sidekick of Dr King. In one of _Rustin_’s final
scenes, MLK looks back wistfully at Bayard just after he finishes his
iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. _Voila! _Bayard has been
redeemed and the mythic narrative of the civil rights movement is
preserved.

Anyone even passingly familiar with Rustin’s life and work should
find this version offensive. Not because it fudges some historical
details (it’s a movie), but because it’s an insult to Rustin’s
actual contribution while shoving his political vision completely out
of frame. In this way, _Rustin_ does more to help us forget what
Bayard actually stood for — especially his cutting critique of the
failures of the Left — than it does to honor the man and his
contribution.

Neglected History

That Rustin has been forgotten in the canonical story of civil rights
is a kind of starting point for the film’s premise. The director
seems to think he’s letting us in on a secret. For, according to his
telling, Rustin was tragically forgotten because he was gay. And only
because of that. Rustin is thus reduced entirely to a tragically
persecuted, but tirelessly dedicated, martyr for the cause. The way we
are meant to repent for our historical neglect of this great figure is
to properly remember Rustin as a gay man first and foremost. Only then
can we place him in his rightful place among the pantheon of civil
rights greats.

It’s not that Rustin’s sexuality was irrelevant to his public
life; indeed it was a major and integral part of who he was and a
major part of why Bayard was so often pushed into the background. But
there is something peculiar about how the film makes Rustin’s
sexuality so central, with the filmmakers even going as far as to
create an entirely fictional relationship for Rustin just to
demonstrate this.

In Rustin’s lifetime, his sexuality was used as an excuse to forget
him — in his death it’s employed now to make us forget what he
stood for.

Elias Taylor (played by Johnny Ramey), the only purely fictional
character in the film, is a gay black Christian but also one who is
married with a baby on the way. But Rustin’s real life relationship
with the young socialist Tom Kahn — who does appear in the film,
played by Gus Halper — was far more interesting. It was this duo,
Rustin and Kahn, who would work together on the pivotal essay _From
Protest to Politics [[link removed]]_,
probably Rustin’s chief strategic statement on civil rights after
the March on Washington. Khan’s actual role in the film, though,
like so many other important characters, is reduced to the status of
faithful henchman and perhaps a onetime lover. Why? Because to develop
Kahn’s character a bit more — a white socialist — would
complicate the film’s message.

It would signal to the viewer that maybe the real ongoing historical
neglect of Rustin was, in fact, political in nature; that Rustin’s
views — on race, economics, and political strategy — were no less
a reason for his official erasure from canonical civil rights history.
In a cruel twist, it seems, Rustin’s sexuality has been weaponized
yet again. In Rustin’s lifetime, it was used as an excuse to forget
him — in his death it’s employed now to make us forget what he
stood for.

And these ideas, as we will see, are arguably more intolerable to
liberal audiences today, than they were even during his lifetime.

The Cult of Youth

Rustin’s relationship with A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) is
another partnership badly butchered by the film. If you didn’t know
better you would assume that Martin Luther King Jr was Rustin’s best
friend and confidant. Randolph, the father of the civil rights
movement and Bayard’s beloved mentor, is portrayed as a doddering
old adviser. You get the sense that this guy
mattered _personally_ for Rustin, and historically for the movement
— but not that he mattered all that much. It’s a depiction that
hardly honors Randolph and the remarkable relationship he and Bayard
had. And it is one that conveniently privileges younger characters at
the expense of the wizened chief.

In one scene Bayard plans his march in a room full of beautiful and
stylish young people. A host of intersectional personalities then
present foolish ideas in turn, taken straight from the contemporary
nonprofit playbook. Yet in this film these kids are depicted, instead,
as inspired strategists. In the scene, Rustin swoons as one of them
insinuates that not only should the heads of major civil rights
organizations speak but so too should the young activists themselves.
It’s a perfect demonstration of the Cult of Youth that has captured
the liberal mindset for half a century or so. And a cheap way to
flatter the sensibilities of the Millennial and Zoomer NGO employees
in the audience today.

The filmmakers have resurrected a historical figure whose actual
politics could not be more at odds with the ones they desperately wish
he had held instead.

But not only is it a total fabrication — the very spirit of it goes
against every principle Rustin upheld in both his work and his
writing. The truth is that Rustin was highly _critical_ — and
explicitly so — of the emerging tendency among young radicals to
“substitute self-expression for politics” and often complained
about the shortsightedness of youthful exuberance getting in the way
of reasoned deliberation. All of which is to say Rustin was anything
but a youth fetishist. And as for the youth themselves, there was no
love lost with them either. In the later 1960s, in fact, the real
Rustin would perpetually rumble with the students of the New Left, who
took special care to skewer Bayard in their polemical essays and
speeches.

Instead of spending his time with wet-behind-the-ears radicals, the
real Rustin spent long evenings planning with veteran generals. Not
only Randolph but also labor leader Norman Hill, who gets almost no
attention in the film, and socialist A. J. Muste, who is portrayed as
an out-of-touch peacenik who tells Rustin to get back in the closet,
accusing him of reverse-racism — a dramatically useful caricature of
the Old White Man.

The problem with leaving these characters out, or distorting their
roles, is not merely that certain Great Men didn’t get their due,
but that these particular figures represent a now dead political world
that this film desperately wants to keep dead. Unfortunately, in
Bayard Rustin, the filmmakers have resurrected a historical figure
whose actual politics could not be more at odds with the ones they
desperately wish he had held instead.

Invisible Labor

Rustin himself credits Randolph for coming up with the very concept of
a March for _Jobs_ and Freedom. The first mention of this name for
the march, though, is hardly remarked upon in _Rustin_. The
filmmakers seem so embarrassed by the very mention of “jobs” (and
jobs _first_) that they bury it in a meaningless conversation. Again,
these aren’t just mistakes. The hip young activists are meant to
replace labor and socialist movement veterans like Randolph, Muste,
and Hill as the _real_ protagonists of history, just as the
Democratic Party has spent years trying to replace their old union
voters with “the youth.”

Though expected for any Hollywood film, the extent to which the labor
movement is made invisible here is genuinely remarkable. As a friend
of mine complained, it’s as if the only reason the unions are
consulted at all is because march organizers need more money for
latrines. Fitting. Worse, this is precisely the kind of attitude
Rustin railed against all his life. “I must confess I find it
difficult to understand the prejudice against the labor movement
currently fashionable among so many liberals.” Rustin carped in
1970, “These people, for reasons of their own, seem to believe that
white workers are affluent members of the Establishment.”

 

Ironically, the march itself was meant to mend and solidify the
relationship between labor and the civil rights movement — not
simply legal protections for racial minorities, but economic
redistribution and social renewal for all, ideas barely mentioned
in _Rustin._ The real Rustin warned against the fraying of the
progressive coalition and worried that both race-forward militancy and
a focus on young “stylish liberals” would destroy any social
democratic horizon.

It’s with truly remarkable prescience that Rustin fretted in 1969
that a new liberal coalition was forming “to be comprised of the
forces at the top — middle-class professionals and the wealthy of
good conscience — and the minorities and the poor at the bottom.”
But Rustin’s favored coalition, with organizations of the civil
rights movement and labor at the center, was dead before it was born.
Born in 1912, he was a man of the Old Left. By 1972 he lamented:
“What was, at the time of the 1963 March on Washington, a reflection
of broad interracial cooperation is, no longer a movement, but a
series of causes, each vying with another for ascendancy.”

Today, we live in the long shadow of that era. _Rustin_ succeeds
only in making certain that we forget that there was indeed a road not
taken.

Anti-Racist?

In the film, we get the impression that Bayard is the consummate
anti-racist, modeled in today’s ideological mold. In a key scene he
stares down Washington, DC police officials and lectures the cops
about what it means to be a “racist” as if the very threat of the
word is supposed to shake them. Of course, today, “racist” is the
worst thing a liberal can call someone or be called. Yet not only was
the word relatively alien to Rustin, but “race prejudice” (the far
more common phrase for the time) was not, according to him, even the
main problem he was trying to solve.

The real Rustin warned that “we get such a kick out of calling
people racists” that we are incapable of seeing the fundamental
conflict in society, let alone doing anything about it. That conflict,
again according to Rustin, “is between poor people and affluent
people. That’s where the problem is, and where it will always be.
And it won’t be easy to solve.”

‘These people, for reasons of their own, seem to believe that white
workers are affluent members of the Establishment.’

Throughout the film this view is alternatively erased or perverted
beyond recognition. Even the very words used are designed to distract
or otherwise reframe the problem in ways that Bayard would have found
inconceivable or detestable. For instance, instead of discussing
“inequality,” screenwriters opted for the word “inequity,” a
little sleight of hand that allows Rustin to fit perfectly with
today’s dominant anti-racist ideology but was likely nowhere to be
found in any of Rustin’s actual writings or speeches.

These little changes make it easy to forget that Rustin’s actual
views were controversial on the Left in his time and perhaps even more
so today. “To talk about blackness is silly,” Bayard complained in
1968, “anybody who talks of the black agenda is a reactionary.” I
wonder how this would play on Twitter/X today? Yet, this is a typical
Rustinism, repeatedly expressed, in different ways, across several
magazines, in speeches, in union halls, and university lectures. For
him, race tribalism was tied to race hatred. “Prejudice,” he was
fond of saying “is of a single bit.”

And he noticed that race came to replace many of the issues that he
found much more pressing: “I’ll bet you there is not a class on
this campus that hasn’t discussed racism,” Rustin charged in a
1969 speech to Clark College. “Our fixation on racism, as important
as the problem is,” he continued, “has obscured the effects of the
technological revolution,” and the economic roots of so many social
ills. A focus on racism was “a cop-out for whites who are titillated
and delighted to be called racists.” It served to satisfy their
masochism more than anything it did for working-class blacks: “And
thus Stokely can come back to the United States and receive $2,500 a
lecture for telling white people how they stink.” Sound familiar?

Yet this Rustin could never be shown on the screen today — in fact,
this Rustin couldn’t even be tolerated. Instead, liberals today
embrace his gay identity _because_ they reject his ideas. Can you
imagine a major black character in a prestigious movie or television
show railing against the abuses of anti-racism today? Famously, a
magician once convinced a live audience that he made the Statue of
Liberty disappear by simply turning the stage beneath their feet. For
Rustin, race politics operated like that — race activists were
illusionists who made the class problem, and all its attendant
political complications, disappear.

Now, thanks to _Rustin_, Bayard himself has become a prop in the
illusion.

Thanks, Obama

Leave it to the Obamas to make this movie. Amid a small revival of
interest in Rustin’s ideas, shared across journals on the Left and
in the political center, they’ve swooped in to make certain that
Rustin’s most important contributions, and especially his warnings
to the Left, would be forgotten entirely. It’s a tragedy. Because a
showcase of Rustin’s ideas could have served as a useful starting
point for probing just what went wrong in the late 1960s that has led
the Left down such a disastrous path.

Instead, we were served a beautifully staged feel-good film that
ultimately allows those of us on the Left to feel self-satisfied at
falsely remembering a lost icon. As such we are no better off. And
until we’re willing to confront Bayard’s critique seriously, we
will continue to make the same basic mistakes that the real Rustin
properly warned us against more than fifty years ago.

 

We will continue to confuse therapeutic protest for meaningful
political interventions. Bayard insisted that the Left ought to push
for larger economic investments and the socialization of the economy
and complained of “dramatic confrontations” that “in no way
further the achievement of radical social goals.” Yet today, when
riots of frustration break out, Congress responds with guilt and pity
instead of investment. In 1969 Rustin groaned that “payments from
the rich to the poor” have begun to “take the form of ‘Giving a
Damn’ or some other kind of moral philanthropy.”

We will continue to demand radical-sounding solutions that serve
conservative ends. Rustin would have argued that the activist demand
to defund police budgets can sound too similar, especially in
resource-starved neighborhoods, to the conservative call to defund
public schools — and the notion that government _cannot_ do
anything to solve our problems, that government _is_ the
problem. As Bayard warned in 1969, “deracinated liberals may
romanticize this politics, nihilistic New Leftists may imitate it”
— but ordinary black workers “will be the victims of its
powerlessness.”

And when we learn that working-class whites have suffered startling
declines in life expectancy, or that overdoses rates have again broken
new records, or that Democrats are failing to convince larger and
larger shares of _non-white_ working-class voters, we will ignore
these problems too. Because we will continue to “get such a kick out
of calling people racists.”

In his time, the political pathologies Rustin identified, and the
coalition that advocated them, were in their infancy. Maybe we are
witnessing their final years today. Or perhaps we are once again
trapped in what Rustin would call “a cycle of frustration,” where
the hopes of the Obama era have crashed hard on the rocks of Trumpism.
Either way, we are at least this lucky — the entire political
experience of the late 1960s through today has proven many of
Rustin’s most trenchant critiques not only valid but urgent.

It’s best that we don’t forget that.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in
Philadelphia.

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