I am so proud to be from Seattle and to be involved in hip-hop. This is amazing: 

Gawker quotes Macklemore’s Rolling Stone interview, in which he says in part: “If you’re going to be a white dude and do this sh*t, I think you have to take some level of accountability. You have to acknowledge where the art came from, where it is today, how you’re benefiting from it. At the very least, just bringing up those points and acknowledging that, yes, I understand my privilege, I understand how it works for me in society, and how it works for me in 2013 with the success that The Heist has had.”

Please read the whole interview for more and feel free, in the comments, to delve in more on Macklemore than myself. I couldn't help but inject myself in to this debate.

I recently made the personal decision of rejecting my "white" ethnicity. Over the years, I've been approached more and more in Spanish and while I was on Guam, I even got asked if I was a mixed native. I have gotten much darker over the years even as I tried to understand my own background. The last years for me personally have been a search for identity and in that search for identity has been a bit of a repulsion even as I immersed myself more in my native "white" culture.

There is serious lack of understanding and self-awareness within white culture. It's really only been around white folks that I have experienced really serious prejudice - so serious I could feel it when I wasn't even bearing the brunt of it. Most other groups in this country know that they have to work with other groups to eat and survive. Only white people refuse to look people of color in the eye, treating them as if they're not human. While I have experienced people of color who have thrown bitterness towards whites my way - there was usually something that brought it on, the refusal to engage people they say as beneath them really is stronger among whites than any other group.

When the subject of race comes up in this country, people of color consistently bring up reality and real events - having white women clutch their purses as they walk by or hearing car doors lock. The white side of the coin seems to be unaware and unempathetic - sort of denying that race exists at all even when the racialism of harassing the first black president with questions about his birth certificate persists. We saw the horror that is at the core of American white culture in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin - it didn't matter what Bill O'Reilly was actually saying, his facial expressions when he talked about black single mothers were like something from a horror movie.

O'Reilly may have started out reasonable and his points about the social irresponsibility of guys like Jay-Z are certainly sound (it is very hard to take Sean Carter seriously as a voice on gun control when his latest album sports lyrics like "I still squeeze Mack 11s like lemons") but when the finger pointing and screaming about "derelict parents" jumped in, it made you really wonder what O'Reilly was trying to say to us.

That sort of intensity when talking about a group that is only about 12% of the population is just scary. I can only imagine how scary it'd seem if I were in that group. Skip to 6:00 when he talks about locking up drug dealers - that will really make your hair stand up.

I personally have ejected. I've started writing "Hispanic" when asked for race in applications for work and school. Race is a socially constructed thing - but social groups are a very serious business for us human beings and I would really rather associate with a group that has a better sense of its own impact on the global ecosystem of ethnicities or even understands that there is a global ecosystem of ethnicities.

That lack of social understanding really is the most significant thing that makes white America stand out as a group and illustrates its maintaining privelege - no other group could even afford to misunderstand the rest of the world so badly. While I commend Macklemore very much for coming up front and telling white America that it needs to join the circle of reality - it's very possible it may fall on deaf ears and that even a boycott could show up. Much of white America is just really into itself.