On a bracing, sunny afternoon in the nation’s capital, one day after the House voted to move forward with impeachment, Mavi’s mind is on anything but Trump. We are sitting in Sankofa, the landmark community bookstore located across the street from Howard University, where Mavi is a junior studying neuroscience. The 20-year-old is remembering his early exposure to Nikki Giovanni’s The Sun Is So Quiet, the poet and activist’s 1996 children’s book, and praising the radically-minded book club run by fellow rapper Noname. “Encouraging economic involvement in your community bookstore, disseminating pertinent information for getting black people through this moment, I fuck with that,” he says. “It’s real useful, and beyond that, it’s beautiful.”

Omavi Minder jumped to the front of an emerging class of young, thoughtful rappers last fall with Let the Sun Talk, and much like Noname’s Book Club, the mixtape is about disseminating pertinent information with a pro-black agenda. The tape’s spoken-word opener “Terms & Conditions” makes Mavi’s aims clear: “To be pro-black/Means to relentlessly pursue/Money, land, guns and useful knowledge/For the purpose of creating and maintaining/Healthy and productive black communities/It means the cultivation of a culture/That reinforces a unified vision of black well-being.” The world’s fear of a black planet is what drives his songs.

Sitting in Sankofa, as throwback rap and classic reggae wafts around us, Mavi is nonchalant and singing along, dressed in layers like someone who now knows the mercurial D.C. winter well: an illustrated NASCAR T-shirt under a zip-up grey hoodie under a pinstripe New York Yankees jersey under a black jacket. The dreadlocks obscuring his face sometimes scatter to reveal a bottom row of gold fronts. The school semester has just ended, and tomorrow he’ll return to Charlotte, North Carolina for winter break.