Last month, just days after the tragedy in Charlottesville, the Rev. Wendell Anthony of Fellowship Chapel in Detroit gave a fiery introduction at a town hall led by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). It may have been a Tuesday, but watching it felt like Sunday service.

In his speech, Anthony praised Sanders’s effort to “take down the tributes to racism and division” through his work standing up for universal health care, jobs for everybody, a higher minimum wage, tuition-free education, and fair treatment and respect from law enforcement. Anthony called the senator someone who “stands up, speaks up, and keeps his eyes on the prize of freedom and justice and equity.”

You probably didn’t see his speech, because it doesn’t fit the narrative persistently pushed by the senator’s opponents: that black Democrats tend to be more socially conservative and “pragmatic” and thus don’t like Bernie Sanders. Last year saw a slew of such articles looking to explain “why black voters don’t feel the Bern” and what his “real problem with black and Hispanic voters” was. The trend is still going strong: This summer, Terrell Starr explored “Bernie Sanders’ black women problem” in the Root.

My biggest regret from the time I spent on the Sanders campaign as his national press secretary is the fact that we allowed this false narrative to fester and did not effectively combat claims that the senator’s economic message somehow didn’t speak to people of color. Jobs and the economy are “everybody” issues. As Democrats work to craft our message to voters for upcoming elections, we cannot allow this narrative to continue unchallenged.

Last spring, a Harvard-Harris poll found Sanders to be the most popular active politician in the country. African Americans gave the senator the highest favorables at 73 percent — vs. 68 percent among Latinos, 62 percent among Asian Americans and 52 percent among white voters. It wasn’t a fluke: This August, black voters again reported a 73 percent favorability rating for Sanders. Critics, such as Starr, continue to point to the senator’s 2016 primary numbers among older African American voters to claim that his message somehow doesn’t resonate with people of color as a whole — and continue to ignore that, according to GenForward, Sanders won the black millennial vote in the primaries.