“We're all by the same name. Even if we answer differently— because we are reflections of the people that planted us here.”

This house is actually owned by my grandmother. When my Grandfather first met my grandmother he came straight from Louisiana’s Popeyes season. 

Q1: So you had some type of connection to Shido with the Louisiana history background?

Yeah, all types of history and I still have family out there.

Honestly, Bay Area folks — Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi… most of our families migrated from there to up here. The Great Migration brought so many of us here. If you didn’t go to Chicago, New York, Toronto, you came out West where the factory jobs were. A lot of automotive jobs. A lot of people fresh out of war. Like my Grandpa, when he got out of war he was a computer scientist. They taught him computer science in there and he was like, “I’m the only nigga out here.”

Q2: Tell us about your upbringing and how you got into music. 

I was born and raised in East Oakland. I’m from 99’ &  Burr Street. I first started music because my older brother is a rapper. He actually taught me how to freestyle and freestyling was my entry into all things musical.  My mom was also a rapper in LA when she was growing up. Actually, one of my first songs that I wrote was a song I made for my mom and put on SoundCloud called “Biters” because she had a song called “Biters” by her rap group.

I was an average youth. I was homeless. There’s a lot of situations where I felt like I had to do what I had to do. And it was my grandmother who put me in an at-risk youth program. She took me out of my house. She was like, ”I’m not gonna let you fail.” She was consistent. I went to the only boarding school in East Palo Alto. I went from an all black boarding prison to an all white college in Ohio and the only thing I had with me was music. No matter where I was, I could rap about this thing that was loosely tied to black culture that everyone kind of wanted a piece of. I definitely think it was a benefit that I spent that time when I was struggling before then. Music means nothing without the manifestation of energy behind it. 

Q3: Where did you go to college and what did you study?

Kenyon College in Ohio — actually just graduated last year. I was really big in sociology and I got a business minor as well. I started a business group there called, “Men of Color”. I also started a band, “Hoody Robin’s”, named after Bootsy Collins. It was a funk band with Eight members. By senior year, the school built a $10,000 studio on campus for us. 

Now, I work as an email manager and work on my music.

Q4: How has Oakland changed since you left four years ago?

Oakland, having seen Oakland... I feel like they're painting their faces. The very, very, very whitespace that this area is, for example, wasn't as white as it used to be. It wasn't as white as it actually looked. But the perception is white. This whole neighborhood, this block was a black neighborhood. When I first came here, the big ass house across the street with the Tesla in front of it was owned by a black woman that had six blind black daughters. She lived to be 101 and she stayed in that house with most of her girls until she passed. There was a black woman that lived on the bottom floor of this apartment right here with a chef husband — that was the first time I've ever seen a man with dreadlocks down to his legs. He gave me a book on what queer identity was. And then later that year, he left his wife — he opened my mind to a complexity of identity. 

My great aunt passed away a few days ago and we held a small funeral service. My grandpa came and gave a speech about lineage. He was like, 

“This is Naomi. Pastor Naomi Willis. She was the daughter of Esther Adams, who was the daughter of Louise Adams, married to Marcus Adams, and Esther Adams was documented by the New York Times. On the first day slaves were set free from the plantation, they asked her questions about what the conditions were like, what her life was like.”

He held up the pictures and he's like,

“This is y'all. This is your lineage. We've never had it easy. But we're forever surrounded by people we love. That's Oakland.”

Q5: Do you feel the love and energy of Oakland your grandfather mentioned during the funeral service is shrinking or being threatened?

I don’t know, man. Niggas been getting killed since I was a little kid. It's so hard to see so many destigmatized pillars in our community — people that have been here forever, but can never reach out for help because they've been hurt so bad by this shit. This system is trying to kill us. 

This is primal territory. No matter what, these white people will kill to have our space — to be in this space. We found somebody in our backyard a few weeks ago. We didn't know who he was and when we came outside, it was an old black man that hopped the fence. It turns out he lived four houses up for 30 plus years. 30 years —  him and his family lived there. He went broke because his father had a medical condition that robbed the family of the house. 

It's so hard for me not to be passionate about this because there's people dying for me without even knowing. There's people dying for us to be in this space without us even knowing it — we're all by the same name. Even if we answer differently —  because we are reflections of the people that planted us here. We're still seasoning.