We Are Poured Out Like Water

Reverend Buford offered these remarks on October 2, 2016, about a month before the presidential election, at the Beyt Tikkun High Holy Days services at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Ca.

Thank you Rabbi Michael Lerner for the invitation to make some brief remarks about what it is like to be an African American in the twenty-first century. This makes me think of W.E.B. Dubois who was answering a similar question over hundred years ago. For him, the question boiled down to being asked “What is it like the be THE Problem?” Everybody has problems and we usually have more than one problem. Shakespeare said that “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

To be Black in the twenty-first century means that you have the same problems that everyone else has, plus the added burden of being seen as the problem by the dominant culture. We will be blamed if Hillary Clinton wins. We will be blamed if Donald Trump wins. With Obama in the White House we can’t win for losing.

In the neighborhood we say “What do it mean?” “What it is?” and “What do it be like?” It’s like waking up every morning with a bad hangover of survivor’s guilt. Walking the streets and catching the bus with the walking wounded and the walking dead who are just waiting for a fresh grave to open up; where every road is either a dead end or an intersection of the Avenue of the Damned and the Boulevard of Lost Souls.

To be Black in twenty-first century U.S.A. is to be poured out like water; a watershed of bloodshed, poured out like water wasted and untasted. Polluted, diluted, Reconstituted, and refuted.

Poured out like water that freezes and turns to dry ice on contact with hearts frozen by the frosty coating of white skin privilege; hearts turned cold by compassion fatigue of hearing about too many cops murdering too many unarmed Black lives because too many of our lives really don’t matter.

We are poured out like water on a hot urban pavement; on a scorching urban landscape that still swelters under the heat of injustice in the twenty-first century while the steam and temperature of our discontent rises in urban rebellions.

We are poured out like water on a hot street where the chalk outline of another brother’s blood can’t contain the pool of blood that won’t stay within the lines.

We are cut down like trees of an old growth redwood forest; cut down in their prime, cut down before their time, cut down by the police and cowardly lyin’; cut down by a cowardly lyin’ legal system, a cowardly lyin’ judicial system; cowardly lyin’ politicians; cowardly lyin’ religious leaders. When you cut down too many trees and too many forests it causes loss of habitat, deforestation, drought, climate change, temperatures rise, displacement, gentrification, loss of green space, loss of oxygen, I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!

What is it like to be a Black Man in the United States in the twenty-first century? We are hunted down, shot down, put down, and slaughtered like the millions of almost extinct wooly-haired buffalo that once roamed the plains. Herds of dark skinned, herds of the wooly-haired descendants of the Buffalo soldiers being exterminated like their buffalo namesakes and the Indians whose culture thrived with the buffalo.

Hunted like the buffalo by SWAT teams, DEA, ATF, police, sheriff’s deputies keeping promises of death and depopulation; hunted down in drive-by shootings by the KKK, Nazis, random idiots, Bloods, and Crips who murder for uniforms and color codes of dishonor.

What is it like to be an African American in the twentyfirst century? It’s like watching a real life movie about your own extinction in slow motion with subtitles that are in a foreign language while you become a cultural artifact and a mural subject for future residents to muse on.

Enough water poured out and justice will roll down like...