Still Got Deep East (Oakland) on My Tongue

By: Dr. Kai Marshall Green*

The tongue does at least two things. It tastes, and it talks. It takes in, and it spits out. Oakland taught my tongue to be ambidextrous in that way. Every school I’ve encountered as a teacher or student has tried to tame this tongue, tried to make me only use my left hand, by cutting off the right. But I can still feel it, phantom limbs and languages.

 I come from Deep East Oakland, the flatlands below the hills, where the mansions look down on everybody else. When people ask how Oakland fed me, I think of food first. A super burrito with shredded chicken from the shop across the street from The Center, cut in half so my mom and I could share. Fried chicken packed in a picnic basket for a three-day visit with my dad at San Quentin. My mom’s pineapple coconut cake and sweet potato pie. Grandma’s gumbo, which came down to me as a few ingredients said over the phone. I had to slow cook and taste-test my way back to her long after she became an ancestor. That’s how a lot gets handed down and passed around where I’m from. Recipes aren’t written; they’re recited and remembered. You use your tongue for the knowing, trial and error.

 Oakland also fed me other things, and I’ve been chewing on the game my whole life. From Oh Happy Day to Blow the Whistle, we got bars. We got stories. We got tongues that folk try to shred, so we go dumb and get stupid—a specific kind of Black genius warrior pose.

The Center

Before I went to any school, I went to The Center. That’s what everybody called 24 Hour Children Center, the daycare my aunt directed on East 14th, the street the city later renamed International Boulevard. We took naps and dreamed on the corner of the stroll. It opened in 1973, and the City of Oakland didn’t put a crosswalk on that corner until 2019. Some days mice ran through The Center, and we stood on tables and chairs until they passed. My aunt made it work anyway. She ran The Center, two shelters for survivors of domestic violence, and a college scholarship for young people in Oakland. She chased robbers off the corner and kept holy anointed oil in her purse. She’d never call herself an organizer, but that’s what she did.

Almost all my cousins came up through The Center. Education mattered. My maternal grandmother went back to college at UC Berkeley to study education after raising eight children, and she earned her master’s. So when I say Oakland fed me, I mean Black women fed me. They fed children breakfast and books and the belief that we were worth teaching, whether or not anybody else said it was ok.

The same year that my Aunt opened The Center, the Black Panther Party opened its own school in East Oakland. It stood at 6118 East 14th Street, the same street as The Center. The Oakland Community School was tuition-free, and it fed its students three meals a day.⁽¹⁾  Years before that, the Party had started feeding Oakland’s children breakfast before school.⁽²⁾ I didn’t grow up knowing that history, but I grew up inside its logic.

“I’m doin’ good”

My mother used my paternal grandmother’s address so I could go to a better school than the one in our neighborhood. From kindergarten through sixth grade, that was John Swett, a public elementary school in East Oakland full of Black and Brown kids. There weren’t enough books for everybody to take one home. I was good at math, and when my teacher put me on the Math Olympics team, I was proud. We trained after school for weeks. Then we rode up to a school in the hills, opened the first round, and saw symbols none of us had ever seen. Nobody on our team made it past round one. I didn’t feel shame. I felt angry. We were good enough. What we were offered wasn’t.

In seventh grade, I got a basketball scholarship to Redwood Day School, a private school in Oakland where most of the kids were white and had money. I spent my first weeks crying in the girls’ bathroom at lunch. It felt less like culture shock than a language barrier. I wrote well, but every time I read aloud, I got corrected. At home, if I had a question, I axed it. At Redwood, I learned that “I’m doin’ good” was wrong. I was supposed to be well. They tried to cut my Deep East Oakland tongue, mostly white teachers with good intentions of creating a “good Negro” and didn’t recognize the violence deeply embedded in their correction.

I learned. I went on to an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, then Williams College, then a PhD at USC. On breaks I’d visit Redwood, and the principal would ask how I was holding up on the East Coast. “Well, I’m doing well,” I’d say. “They’re doing a good job with you,” he told me, and I was proud. Then I’d go see my cousins. “Oh, you still got your white people accent on; you can drop it here.” I could drop it. That’s what scared me. I knew I’d have to put it back on the minute I left.

What I couldn’t drop was the rest of it: the talkin’, the stories, my ambidextrous tongue. That’s the Oakland I still carry. The first real theorists I ever met weren’t in a seminar room. They were my mom, grandmothers, my dad, my aunties and uncles, sitting around the table telling tales over fountains of coffee. Nobody would ever read about their heroics in a book, but they lived and practiced the theory that kept me alive.

Main Street

I teach now at the University of Delaware, in the department of Africana Studies, a whole country away from East 14th. I did everything those schools asked of me, and I still know my place is not in the academy, not in any department. I’m always too much: too Black, too gay, too trans, still too “that nigga.” Class matters. A PhD doesn’t wash the Deep East off your body or tongue; I been dipped in that Deep East buttah. At Williams, I was beloved by my students and a nuisance to colleagues who thought I was crazy for playing my music loud. The dream of getting out of Oakland and becoming a professor came true, and it doubled as an ivory tower nightmare. But the classroom isn’t the institution. A classroom can be a table, and I know how to feed people at a table.

 This fall, my students in my Black Feminist Theory and Black Masculinities classes both spent two weeks focused on the Black Panther Party. Then, on a Saturday night, October 31st, 2026, there was a shooting on Main Street, and a University of Delaware student was among those injured.

Within hours, social media was filled with racist comments blaming Black people, Delaware State students (an HBCU), and Black high schoolers for violence they did not commit. Before anyone knew the facts, a story was already being told: Black people in public space are dangerous. In our class, we call that a master narrative. It’s old, it’s fast, and it’s built to feel like common sense.⁽³⁾

I canceled Wednesday’s class and recorded a letter to my students instead. I wrote it in the tongue Oakland gave me, the one that knows how to name what’s happening and take care of people in the same breath:

When most people picture the Panthers, they picture guns… What I want you to see is what organized community does. The Panthers fed children breakfast before school. They opened free health clinics and tested people for sickle cell anemia. They drove families to visit loved ones in prison… That is the part of the story the master narrative leaves out: Black people taking care of Black people when no one else would.⁽⁴⁾

When I wrote “they drove families to visit loved ones in prison,” I thought of my mother and me on the train to San Quentin going to visit my dad with a picnic basket and playing Go Fish for hours. I’d never put those two things side by side before. The letter told my students what organizing is. It names what is happening. It refuses the story told about us. And it takes care of its people. I’d watched it happen that same weekend, when the Black Student Union spoke up within hours, demanded accountability, and reminded everyone to check on their friends. Accountability and care at the same time: that’s Black feminist practice. It’s also my aunt lining up me and my cousins, teaching us how to get out of a chokehold.

The table

On November 9th, 2026, my department will host a Black Table Talk: Black Healing Matters, with Jonathan Lykes, BYP100’s Director of Culture, and Je Naé Taylor, co-founder of BYP100 and the Black Joy Experience.⁽⁵⁾ “Black Healing Matters” is also the title of a chapter in my memoir, A Body Made Home: They Black Trans Love. This chapter centers the season when my own mind broke. I was teaching at Williams College, holding queer students, trans students, Black students, and organizing with BYP100 on the healing and safety council, ironically. I was doing too much, and I crashed. And I burned. And I’m still burning.

I bring this up because people forget that healing is essential to the practice of Black liberation. Sometimes the image outlives the politics. You remember that poster of a Panther woman cooking eggs for a room full of kids before the school bell? She’s still feeding people.

What’s still on my tongue

So how has Oakland fed me?

It fed me a super burrito cut in half. It fed me Grandma’s gumbo—I know it by heart/taste. I learned to trust my own tongue. It fed me righteous rage instead of shame. It fed me the knowledge that the story told about us is not the truth about us, and that the people telling the first story are rarely the ones feeding the children.

And it fed me a tongue that school spent nearly twenty years trying to cut out and couldn’t. I still say it the way I say it. When my students are hurting, I don’t reach for “I hope you are doing well.” I reach for what I learned at those tables: I’m thinking about you. You don’t have to carry this alone. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.⁽⁶⁾

Sixty years after the Panthers, I’m a Black trans professor from Deep East Oakland, teaching this history in Delaware while somebody online tells the old story again. I’ve got a whole education in my mouth now, all the big words and theories. But I will never let go of this Deep East swagger on my tongue. It tastes like home, and it talks and fights back.

Notes

* Portions of this essay are adapted from, and a few lines are quoted directly from, Kai Marshall Green, A Body Made Home: They Black Trans Love (New York: Feminist Press, 2026), especially the prelude, chapter 5 (“A Break”), chapter 7 (“Black Healing Matters”) and the epilogue.

1. Amanda Font, “How the Black Panthers Shaped U.S. Schools,” KQED, November 14, 2024, https://www.kqed.org/news/12014210/how-the-black-panthers-shaped-u-s-schools; “Oakland Community School,” Oakland Wiki, https://oaklandwiki.org/Oakland_Community_School.
2. “Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program (1969–1980),” BlackPast.org, February 11, 2010, https://new.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-1969-1980/. The program began in January 1969 at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland because hunger made it hard for poor Black children to learn.
3. Kai Marshall Green, “Dear AFRA 352: On Care, Narrative, and Organizing,” recorded letter to students, University of Delaware, November 2026.
4. Green, “Dear AFRA 352.” The letter draws on Angela Davis on the Panther image and Tracye Matthews on women’s work in the Party.
5. Department of Africana Studies, University of Delaware, “Black Table Talks: Black Healing Matters,” event flyer, November 9, 2026.
6. Green, “Dear AFRA 352.”

Bio: Dr. Kai Marshall Green (he/they) is a shape-shifting Black Queer Feminist nerd; an Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world; a scholar, poet, facilitator, filmmaker; & an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at The University of Delaware. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity w/ specializations in Gender Studies & Visual Anthropology at USC. His debut memoir, A Body Made Home: They Black Trans Love (The Feminist Press), came out in February 2026. He is a proud founding member of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). Instagram and Twitter: @drDrummerBoiG