

Everyone Needs to Hear Macklemore on White Privilege and Race in America - emcarey
http://mic.com/articles/107482/everyone-needs-to-hear-macklemore-on-iggy-azalea-white-privilege-and-race-in-america

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b6
I am so sick, sick, sick -- down to my bone marrow -- of this modern, hip,
insidiously balkanizing form of racism.

> stealing black musical sounds and styles

I don't find myself building walls like this, constructing a fortress based
around my ethnicity. I don't think of myself as white, or black, or really,
anything at all. My body's coordinates in the DNA hyperspace just aren't very
important to me! Yours aren't very important to me, either.

But DNA hyperspace coordinates seem very important to some people. They seem
to think we should care about them very much and think about them much more
often, and treat people differently based on them.

They also seem very confident when they declare just where to draw the lines
of ethnicity. "This person", they say, "is black, and this person is white,
and this person is, well, it's hard to tell, but we can be sure they're a
person of color," and so on. And, incredibly, they seem very sure what
innovations and pieces of culture belong to which groups.

To me, it's an incomprehensibly fine spectrum, and an impossibly complex graph
of social interactions, and I would be hard pressed to say anything about it
with certainty, but this type of person seems to know, somehow. They visually
scan a person and easily ascertain whether that person is authorized by
ethnicity to do certain things. Iggy Azalea _stole_ musical sounds and styles
that _belonged_ to black people -- unassailable fact -- and she should give
them back, and apologize, and never do it again.

Well, I actually think it would be good if we cared about ethnicity and gender
much _less_ than we do now. I think that's actually how to be less racist and
sexist -- to not care very much about ethnicity or gender.

I also reject cultural appropriation. Culture is like an infinite number of
blenders recursively blending an infinite number of machine guns that
constantly shoot out more blenders. Get used to it. Nothing is special,
nothing belongs to you. "Your" thing is going to be reinterpreted
unpredictably in other peoples' minds, folded, spindled, mutilated. You have
no control over it, and nor should you.

To me there is one type of human, ONE. We're all basically the same. We're in
an awkward time right now because a very thin veneer of difference in the form
of languages and culture makes it easy to believe we're a bunch of different
tribes and need to fear and distrust each other. I want to tear down the walls
between us -- but this weird, annoying, dangerous mind virus is all about
building the walls back up. Well, could you please knock it off?

Or go ahead and continue building the walls. Barricade yourself in your
special fortress because you're an X, and encourage others to barricade
themselves in their own special fortresses because they're Ys or Zs or
whatever else. That's your choice. But please, please, please, stop claiming
to be against racism, when really you'd love it if everyone would just be
racist in the way you'd prefer.

