Black Buck(114)

A thin man wearing a headset walked in. “Ready? Follow me please.”

As I exited the green room, I looked back, finally finding Rhett’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Buck. But you did this to yourself.”

“Up there,” the man said, gesturing to a small set of stairs leading to the stage.

I made my way up the stairs before two things stopped me in my tracks. One was the sight of a packed theater. There were easily five thousand people sitting there, laptops on their knees, phones in their hands, and complete silence as they focused their eyes on the stage, which held surprise number two: Bonnie Sauren.

She was sitting in one of two blue chairs, sipping bottled water, and smiling when she saw the shock on my face. On the oversize screen behind her was the title of our session: DIVERSITY GONE WRONG: BUCK VENDER IN CONVERSATION WITH BONNIE SAUREN.

“Look who showed up,” Bonnie said, flashing her white teeth toward the crowd like blood diamonds. “It’s the man of the hour, Buck Vender. Let’s all please give Buck the welcome he deserves.”

It started in the nosebleeds—a faint buzzing. But as it made its way toward me, like a towering tsunami complete with deadly white froth at the top, the wave of boos crashed into me with merciless ferocity.

Fuck me. This is an ambush.



* * *





The booing intensified as I made my way over to Bonnie, the sheer hatred it was laced with was a living, breathing, dangerous organism. I felt it in my bones, like the way you can feel the bass in your heart at a concert. I closed my eyes, waiting. But when the booing settled down, five thousand people began chanting, “RACIST! RACIST! RACIST! TERRORIST! TERRORIST! TERRORIST!” Bonnie, pleased, sat in her seat as snug as a white bug in a rug.

After a few minutes of this, which felt like a few days, she gripped her microphone, smiled, and said, “I’m with each and every one of you. But we’re here for a conversation, so please let us get on with it.”

Conversation? More like a modern-day lynching. When I looked out into the crowd, all I saw was a sea of red-faced men and women out for Black blood—my Black blood.

“You know?” Bonnie said, turning to me with that same plastic smile plastered to her plastic face. “We’ve actually never met before. But I met your friend Jason, right? That guy with the ski mask who said you both used to rob ice cream trucks together?”

“THUG!” someone shouted not too far from the stage.

“But,” Bonnie continued, “the two of us have never had the pleasure of meeting. Has anyone ever told you that you look like Drake? I’m Bonnie,” she said, extending a hand toward me.

“Buck.” I shook her hand. She wiped it off on her skirt.

“Buuuuuck,” she said, drawing it out. “What an interesting name. Why don’t we start there, hmm? How did you get the name Buck?”

“It was a nickname I got when I started at Sumwun.”

“And who gave it to you?”

I flashed back to that day in Qur’an. “An old colleague,” I said, straightening up.

Bonnie nodded. “Old indeed, huh? I heard it was Clyde Moore the Third, president of the White United Society of Salespeople. Is that true?”

I grabbed my bottled water from the little table between us and nodded.

“And it was because you had worked at Starbucks for, what, four years?”

I nodded again.

“My, hiring standards sure have dropped over the years,” she said, turning to the audience. Laughter spread throughout the theater faster than the Paris Hilton sex tape.

“Okay, so you used to work at Starbucks. Clyde Moore hired you—”

“Rhett Daniels,” I said, my voice cracking in all the wrong places, forcing me to take another sip of water. “He hired me.”

“That’s not what he says. He says it was Clyde’s idea to take a chance on you, that he was just there to try to mentor you. And look at how you repaid him. By proving to be a closeted racist and founding a terrorist organization.”

“It’s not a—”

“Which brings us to the topic of today’s conversation. Diversity gone wrong. When power is placed in the hands of the wrong people and abused, just as you abused yours. So, tell us, why do you hate white people, Buck?”

Everything slowed down, and the only thing I could hear was my heartbeat, ticking like a bomb. It pulsed in my ears, and in the veins in my head, arms, hands, legs, and feet.

I turned toward the audience. There was so much anger on their faces—red, fiery, heart-stopping anger. I truly didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand why they looked like they wanted me dead when they didn’t even know me. And if they didn’t know me and already hated me, I had nothing to lose, so I reached for my water, drained half of it, and took a deep breath.

“I don’t,” I said. “But let me ask you something, Bonnie. How many Black people are employed by LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Tumblr?”

She rolled her eyes, looking to the audience, and laughed. “Oh, come on. Not the race card. That is so played out, Buck.”

“You played the race card when you asked me why I hate white people, which I don’t, so humor me. How many people, say, out of a hundred, are Black at those companies?”