I guess I’m supposed to be happy today. I’m supposed to feel that because the deadliest, most corrupt, most villainous president of my lifetime is gone, that I’m waking up to a new, more joyous day. And, personal politics about Biden aside, he is going to be objectively better, less deadly, and less corrupt than the avowed racist who left the White House yesterday. Today is going to be a better day for all of us than yesterday was, let alone the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. I should feel some sort of joy about this.

But I don’t. I feel like I shouldn’t be here. …

There’s a scene in “Duck and Cover,” the eighth episode of The Wire’s second season, that has been on my mind for the past two weeks.

In the scene, detectives Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski and Lester Freamon are cracking the code behind tracking the longshoremen’s illegal drug-smuggling shipments. Prez notes that they uncovered Frank Sobotka’s scheme much more easily than they did the Barksdale operation in the Baltimore projects. Rather than sending codes like the Barksdale crew did, Sobotka and his fellow longshoremen made direct phone calls using their real numbers and talking plainly about their criminal activity.

“Not as careful as Barksdale’s people were,” Prez says. …

“You know you look skinny, right?” The words felt like a too-tight hug that was starting to hurt.

At the time, I was in the middle of a weight-loss journey, having lost about 40 pounds from my adult high of 250 or so. (The “or so” is because I had no idea. I’d stopped weighing myself and stupidly refused to go to the doctor until I lost weight.) I’d gone from XXXL shirts and a 38-inch waist to larges and a 34-inch waist. But I was complaining about still feeling fat. …

Questions have emerged from the attempted coup on Capitol Hill this past Wednesday. Many of them have caused so much of America to reevaluate its understanding of how the law and fairness work in this country. How are these people allowed to invade the Capitol and go free? Why are these traitors treated with more kindness than Black people have ever faced for trying to secure equal rights? Where are the arrests? How did this happen?

These are questions that, unfortunately, Black people have had the answers for since we came to this country. And the answer is quite simple: white men have been able to experience an American life unlike anyone else. They get to do the worst harm imaginable without consequence. The meager punishments white men have faced — and the reactions to those slaps on the wrist — only reinforces the fact that they get to live limitless, consequence-free lives. …

I know I shouldn’t feel this way. I fight it with everything I have. I’ve worked to feel something other than what my most base instincts are pulling at me to feel. My brain tells me to keep these thoughts somewhere in my gut, away from my mouth and the keyboard at my fingertips. But I can’t help it. The voice is still there: Why aren’t police shooting these people?

January 6, 2021, is one of those moments in American history we’ll always remember. One that redefined the country and tore through a bottomless well of facades built on preserving White myths. Trump supporters — whether Proud Boys or MAGA Nation or neo-Nazis or all of the above or anything else — armed themselves with heavy artillery and stormed Capitol Hill. They scaled the Capitol building. They took the House floor. They occupied the offices of sitting representatives. They did this all on national TV and live on Twitter. …

Most of America found out about Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler last summer when WNBA stars from the Atlanta Dream — a team Loeffler owns — responded to her comments “adamantly” opposing the Black Lives Matter movement by wearing shirts supporting Raphael Warnock, who is running against her. A few months later, Loeffler is one-fourth of a battle for the future of politics in America. If Loeffler and her Republican peer David Perdue lose their respective Senate races, then the Senate flips blue and Mitch McConnell will no longer hold America hostage.

Loeffler has chosen to forge a campaign against Warnock — a Black pastor — that leverages America’s history of racism and fear of Black men. Loeffler has used the language of fear and violence to address Warnock at every turn. During their debate last year, she referred to him as some variant of “Radical Warnock” instead of his actual title, “Reverend” (this, of course, went unmentioned among supposed evangelical Christian supporters). Her official website even has a tab that simply says “Radical Warnock.” …

I planned to write about MF DOOM this past November to mark the 16th anniversary of his classic album Mm..Food? But as can often be the case for writers, other stories happened, so I put it off, figuring I’d have more opportunities to give Daniel Dumile his flowers while he could smell them through his metal mask. Little did I, or the hip-hop world, know that even mid-November would have been too late. On New Year’s Eve, his wife announced that the 49-year-old cult rap legend had died on October 31.

Around that time, I revisited Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2009 New Yorker profile of the reclusive MC. I was struck by what had initially driven Coates to become a fan of the artist formerly known as Zev Love X. “When I rediscovered Dumile in his new guise,” Coates writes, “I was on the cusp of fatherhood and life-partnership, and considering divorce from the music of my youth… I was worn down by the petty beefs between rappers… and by the music’s assumption of all the trappings of the celebrity culture in which it now existed.” …

It’s been a common refrain for my entire life as a rap fan: “rap is missing the lyricism of the old days.” That’s mostly rubbish as there’s more than enough lyricism in rap now and as much as there has ever been. But let’s just go with it. If you’re looking for a bar-heavy barrage of complex Hip-Hop, you might want to take it back to the essence and get into battle rap.

Now, I know you’re probably somewhat familiar with battle rap, whether that be Eminem’s 8 Mile movie or 106 & Park’s Freestyle Friday, but times have changed. There’s no longer the assumption that rappers are actually freestyling and, with the exception of the highly entertaining Verbal Warzone league, rappers aren’t battling over beats anymore. Rappers come prepared with three rounds of material that they’ve written, rehearsed and memorized. They sometimes come with props, partners jumping in and any array of theatrics. The beauty, though, is that it all comes down to lyrics, charisma and performance. Each rapper essentially performs a live EP of rhymes about their opponent. …