[Editor's Note: The following article is part of BlackOut: A Five-Year Retrospective on Portland’s Racial Justice Movement, a joint publication from Donovan Scribes and the Portland Mercury. Written exclusively by Black Portlanders, the purpose of BlackOut is to remember and reflect on the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, and the 100+ days of protests in Portland that same year. You can find BlackOut in print at more than 500 locales citywide, inserted inside the Mercury's Food Issue. You can read all the BlackOut articles here.]
I grew up inside a world within a world. A constellation of structures and landmarks that formed the outer-ring of a web of connected networks that, like a bed of mycelium, connected mothers to aunties, aunties to neighbors, and neighbors to other neighbors (all of whom were deputized ass-whoopers).
My neighborhood teemed with the kind of vivacious youthful activity one might expect from a Sandlot and Everybody Hates Chris crossover. The summer streets swelled under the weight of our curiosity and mischief; its warm wind carrying the smell of sweet pine, sweaty clothes, and Sportin’ Waves. Our homes were active volcanoes, volatile, at any moment suddenly exploding with the resounding booms of a prepubescent stampede launching a full scale assault on the industrial-sized Gushers and Costco Redvines tub, only to vanish just as quickly in anticipation of the ubiquitous "Quit runnin’ in an’ outta my goddamn house!" My backyard was a sanctuary for ballers, musicians, and pseudo grill masters. Its steeple was a contorted, right-justified hoop whose cement anchor still couldn't withstand the unremitting force of the neighborhood athletes’ left-side flight, from where there was infinitely more runway. This was my world: the bloody noses from fights at Whitaker, Ms. Pac-Man and grease-steeped bags of krinkle cut fries from Mr. Burger, and the curbs where flesh and blood were deposited in failed attempts to emulate the older kids.
But by 2020 that world had all but eroded entirely. It wasn't a singular cataclysmic event. It was like shrinking in height by a few centimeters every so often; an imperceptible loss not consciously registered until you suddenly can't reach something that was always accessible. I looked up and had become a ghost in my own neighborhood, a relic in a place that I could scarcely recognize. The structures and landmarks that shaped us were stripped away plot by plot. The sanctuary that pulsed with adolescent vivacity was reduced to a lifeless staging area for garbage and recyclables. And yet it was here in this hollowed-out place that, while putting up some shots with a homie, I received a call from a close mutual friend asking if we were protesting that night. The question was less an invitation than an inevitability. Though I had never protested before, the answer to me was obvious. However, as I stepped out of my yard, I had no idea that I was not only leaving home, but also crossing a threshold into one of the most pivotal turning points in my life.
I’ve never felt more detached from my own memories than I do from those of the protest era of 2020. It’s as if they belong to someone else, a life I briefly inhabited but can no longer fully access. I feel more tethered to the recollections of my 8-year-old self than to the days and nights spent in the streets, the chants that once filled my lungs, the urgency that once governed my every move. It was for me, an epoch that permeated in this disorienting synthesis of adrenaline, emotions, paranoia, malnutrition, and sleep deprivation; a fever-dream surging ever forward with no clarity, no moment to process, no space to breathe, and whose components (even now as I write this) elude me, resisting clarity. It was a time that consumed me entirely, and yet, in its aftermath, it remains just beyond my reach.
Think, think....
The first night was a cold plunge. We emerged from our COVID bubbles into a massive pulsing wave of human energy, my senses bathed in its frenzy. I remember my group formed a human chain that grew in size as more of our people collided with it, and one collision in particular was with Darren Golden. Darren’s older brother Anthony was one of those hoopers everyone knew about when I was a kid, and could invariably be found at whatever basketball camp was operating at the time, getting crazy buckets. We grew up about 6 or 7 blocks from each other, and once Tony and I became high school classmates, their family pretty quickly became my extended family.
As our chain snaked through the endless crowd, we found ourselves in a moment that felt frozen in time: a standoff between the police and thousands of protesters, bisected by a chain link fence, and at the head were a number of young Black women confronting the authorities, their voices carrying across the divide. It was a moment of impasse and when the stalemate held, we withdrew back into the march, carried by a relentless tide of fervid souls, the streets pulsing beneath us, the air swelling with urgency, thick with the smoke of our discontent. The evening reached its crescendo on the steps of Revolution Hall. Darren, myself, and a handful of others found ourselves before a crowd teetering between exhaustion and unrelenting resolve. Their faces, illuminated by streetlights and cell phone screens, reflected the weight of the moment.
I remember many of those earlier nights concluded in my basement, the walls trembling with the frenetic energy of raw passion and unfettered ambition. Many of my earliest co-conspirators were from my lost and forgotten world: childhood friends, basketball teammates, creative peers, people I got into trouble with, grew with, dreamed with. We often spoke with fire about the way things were, the way they should be, the way they might never be. Many of those passionate exchanges occurred in that very basement; and yet, no matter how high our words soared, they always fell back to that basement floor, settling like dust, while the world outside remained as deaf and indifferent as ever. Then suddenly we had the world’s undivided attention.
The next day I spent what money was left in my account on a small red wagon, Harbinger PA speaker, and microphone. We hit the streets again.
I don't think I've ever reflexively given myself to an idea or cause so absolutely as I did to that movement. In the beginning I was working a full time 12-hour night shift lead position at Nike. This was often my next destination after a long day of organizing and leading massive and emotionally taxing protests. I wasn't eating or sleeping much during that time, and remember a trip to Seattle for Christmas at my brother's house when one of my family members remarked on how prominently my ribs were showing as I changed shirts. At 6'2 I had gone from 180 lbs at the onset of COVID to around 140 lbs after just a couple months. I was emaciated, exhausted, and mentally taxed; and at the same time profoundly resolute, determined, and proud.
I never sought to be a leader in the protests. I often questioned whether I even belonged in the movement, whether I had any right to speak on the matters that weighed upon the shoulders of my people.
The success of Portland’s 2020 protests can be attributed to a confluence of forces—a collision of political turbulence, a crippling global pandemic that had rendered life unrecognizable, and a moral reckoning that sent waves of electricity through the dormant limbs of this city’s white population, galvanizing their bodies into action. For a fleeting moment, it seemed as if the collective conscience of the city had risen, unified in its rejection of the system that had long determined whose breath was precious and whose life was expendable.
But a movement born from borrowed urgency can’t endure. Without an internalized understanding of the struggle, without a commitment that extends beyond the moment of spectacle, energy dissipates and engagement wanes. The extrinsic forces that had catalyzed their participation (the unprecedented stillness of a world at a standstill, the shock of televised brutality) would, in time, subside. And as life resumed its rhythm, so did the hierarchy of concern, leaving behind those for whom the fight was never optional, never a passing moment, but an inescapable reality.
Once the ephemeral phase of white participation subsided and "compassion fatigue" set in, the marches grew thinner, the headlines fewer, and as ferociously as the initial swell of support, came the backlash.
It was during this time that forces outside the movement turned their attention to Darren. To discredit and dismantle. A man who had once been a rallying point became a target, a symbol not of justice but of controversy. The movement, which had been built to challenge our corrupt systems of power, began to turn inward. Its righteous indignation redirected upon itself. The same voices that had once shouted in unison now spoke in suspicion, and accusation.
As time pressed forward, I watched as the people I had stepped into this movement with (the ones who embodied its very essence, who carried its weight, not as theory but as lived experience) began to disappear. One by one, they slipped away, their presence erased by exhaustion, disillusionment, or the quiet but crushing reality that movements too can betray their own. I looked up and realized I had again been reduced to a ghost in what had once been a shared fight. A relic in a movement that I no longer recognized.
I never sought to be a leader in the protests. I often questioned whether I even belonged in the movement, whether I had any right to speak on the matters that weighed upon the shoulders of my people. After all, I was hardly the paragon of Black civic engagement. I wasn’t a scholar of political science, the architect of policy, or the eager disciple of some nonprofit mission. I didn’t carry credentials stamped with the approval of the academy, nor did I walk in lockstep with those who had made activism their profession.
But perhaps that was in itself the Great Deception. That one must be ordained by institutions to speak of the suffering they had endured since birth.
I knew, deep within me, that the fight for dignity is not confined to the learned, or reserved for those who have studied its mechanics in books. The movement belonged to those who had felt, in their bones, the weight of history pressing down upon them. It belongs to those who, though unsanctioned by pedigree, carry within them the unshakable knowledge of what it means to be Black in a world that would rather we be silent, still, or gone altogether.
So, I stood, uncertain but unwavering, knowing that the truest qualification for the movement was not found in degrees or affiliations, but in the simple, unyielding fact of being.
I think there’s a part of me that feels a quiet relief in not remembering much of that time; it was a season of loss, heartbreak, violence, lies, and unimaginable overwhelm. But it was also a time of transformation, passion, collectivity, hope, and pride. A time when I stood before my own convictions, to see them tested and laid bare, shoulder to shoulder, with people from a world that now largely exists only in our photo albums, in the fading corners of our memories. I was reminded of the profound weight and sacred worth of community—the kind that looks out for you, steadies you when you falter, that feeds you when you’ve forgotten that you’re starving, that sees and loves the all of you. There are so many people from that time whom I hold a deep and abiding love for, whose courage, resilience, and boundless devotion to Blackness live as a form of protest in and of itself. I see it everywhere now—woven into the arts, in city council meetings, in the development of the built environment. In every act of defiance. I see a quiet yet undeniable revolution.
Devin Boss, former ED of Rose City Justice, is a NE Portland native, filmmaker, and owner of North East Productions.
