Everyone Needs to Hear Macklemore on White Privilege and Race in America

http://mic.com/articles/107482/everyone-needs-to-hear-macklemore-on-iggy-azalea-white-privilege-and-race-in-america

by emcarey • 12 years ago

1 1 12 years ago

b6• 12 years ago

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.

Everyone Needs to Hear Macklemore on White Privilege and Race in America

Related Stories