Hot 97 is having all the interesting race conversations this month.
Two weeks after Azealia Banks broke down cultural appropriation in hip-hop on Ebro in the Morning, Macklemore appeared on the same show to throw in his two cents.
Well, it was so much more than that. Macklemore was on the show for more than an hour. He talked about the deaths of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, the whole texting Kendrick Lamar thing, and white privilege.
Speaking on Garner and Brown, Macklemore said:
“If there’s anything positive that has come out of their deaths, I believe it has brought attention to the injustices that have been plaguing America since the [beginning]. Racial profiling. Corrupt judicial system. Police brutality. Now people are talking about these things and mobilizing.”
On “robbing Kendrick” of the Best Rap Album Grammy, Macklemore had this to say:
“I thought Kendrick had a better album…The mistake came from Instagramming the text message and betraying my homie’s trust. That’s wack…The language that I used was a bad call. “Robbed” was a bad choice of word. White people have been robbing black people for a long time. Of culture. Of music. Of freedom. Of their lives. That was a mistake.”
And on white culture, Macklemore said:
“You need to know your place in the culture. Are you contributing or are you taking? Are you using it for your own advantage or are you contributing? I saw a tweet that said, “Hip hop was birthed out of the civil rights movement.” This is a culture that came from pain and oppression. It was the byproduct [of white oppression]. We can say we’ve come a long way since the late Seventies and early Eighties, but we haven’t. Just because there’s been more successful white rappers, you cannot disregard where this culture came from and our place in it as white people. This is not my culture to begin with.”
Some intriguing stuff here. Watch the entire interview above.
SOURCE: RollingStone
