One half of the Grammy winning duo, Macklemore and Lewis, speaks up about an on-going issue regarding race in the rap industry during a Hot 97 radio interview held earlier this week. 

"For me, as a white dude-as a white rapper-I'm like, how do I participate in this conversation? How do I participate?" he posits.

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"How do I get involved on a level where I'm not coopting the movement or I'm not making it about me, but also realizing the platform I have and the reach that I have, and doing it in an authentic, genuine way. Because race is uncomfortable to talk about. White people, we can just turn off the TV when we're sick of talking about race. We can be like, 'No, I'm done.'"

"It does not work that way for everybody," Macklemore says. "White 'liberal' people want to be nice. We don't want to mess up. We don't want to be racists. We want to be like, 'We're post-racial and we have a black president and we don't need to talk about white privilege. It's all good, right?' It's not the case."

"Why am I safe? Why can I cuss on a record, have a parental advisory sticker on the cover of my album, yet parents are still like, 'You're the only rap I let my kids listen to. Why can I wear a hoodie and not be labeled a thug?...The privilege that exists in the music industry is just a greater symptom of the privilege that exists in America. There's no difference."

Macklemore's thoughts on the issue come fresh after a heated debate sparked between Australian rapper Iggy Azalea and African American rapper Azalia Banks who got into a feud about white and black rappers in the industry.

The bottom line, it seems, for the Grammy winner when it comes to white rappers getting accepted into the hip-hop community is all about, knowing 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 '70s and early '80s, 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. As much as I have honed my craft...I do believe that I need to know my place."

TagsMacklemore, Ryan Lewis, grammys, race, Rap Industry, hip hop