[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. Chris wrote most of this piece while he was in Oregon State Correctional Institution during Summer 2020.]

How do I explain what it means to be Black in America to someone who isn’t? When you say you feel me, I believe you—but do you really understand me? Because there’s a difference. Most of the time, I feel like people only pay attention when the cameras are rolling, when another Black life is taken by police, when the streets are on fire with protest. But what about when the smoke clears? What about the everyday struggle of being Black in a country that was never built for us to thrive?

I grew up in both North/Northeast Portland in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The city was different then, but the cycle was the same. Gang violence, drugs, broken homes, underfunded schools, over-policed neighborhoods;, a system that saw us as numbers, not names. I didn’t understand it back then, I just lived it. It took prison to force me to see the full picture.

I was 18 when I picked up that gun. I remember the weight of it, the false sense of power it gave me. I wasn’t firing bullets, I was firing exclamation points. Because I was done talking. I wanted respect. I knew fear could get it. And at that moment, I didn’t realize how much I had already lost. That decision cost me 20 years. It was during my incarceration that I was encouraged to take college courses through the Inside-Out program with University Of Oregon that played a huge role in my overall rehabilitation and put me in a position to be considered for early release. During the pandemic, wildfire across the state  forced a number of prisons to evacuate, shoving hundreds more inmates into our already over-crowded institution at Oregon State Penitentiary. Seeing the obvious health risk, Governor Kate Brown began commuting sentences to let folks out; including mine.  

Now, I sit with the “what ifs.” What if I had mentors who looked like me? What if my school had the resources to see my potential instead of just disciplining me? What if the system had invested in me instead of locking me away? But we don’t get do-overs. What we can do is change the future.

2020 was a reckoning. George Floyd’s murder set the world on fire, but that fire was burning long before that knee was on his neck. The protests, the anger, the calls for justice… none of that came out of nowhere. It came from generations of oppression, from communities screaming into the void, demanding to be heard. Five years later, we have to ask: Did you hear us? Do you remember? Or was it just another news cycle?

People say we have choices. But what happens when every choice is shaped by poverty, by policy, by a system that was never built for us to win? The choices we make are the symptoms of a much bigger disease: colonialism, redlining, mass incarceration, police brutality. The weight of history pressing down on our backs.

Still, I believe in hope. I believe change starts with a shift in consciousness: how we think, how we see each other, how we break the cycle. Without that, nothing changes.

My name is Chris, but my folks call me “Naughty.” And I know you feel me— but do you understand me? Five years after George Floyd, do you still see us? Or did you just move on?

Christopher Lambert is a powerful speaker, mentor, and justice reform advocate with the Oregon Justice Network, dedicated to empowering at-risk youth and returning citizens. As Regional Service Director of Rose City J.A.M., he transforms his lived experience into leadership programs like Night Sports, helping justice-impacted individuals rewrite their futures.