The rap awards were the most tortured, for artists and observers alike. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have experienced a very peculiar sort of hip-hop fame, one that has little to do with approval from the center of hip-hop, and it has unfolded largely without black gatekeepers, a traditional hallmark of white rappers through the years. Instead, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis jumped straight from the independent hip-hop underground to the pop charts, which has left them scrambling to shore up their bona fides retroactively.

So when Macklemore bests Mr. Lamar — and Jay Z, Drake and Kanye West — for a rap award, he makes sure that he kisses the ring. “I robbed you” is a strikingly powerful phrase in this context: a white artist’s muscling into a historically black genre, essentially uninvited, and taking its laurel. In a nutshell, this is the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate.

To many, that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were nominated in the rap categories at all was an affront. Hip-hop purists love a good debate about boundaries and who gets to police them. (Almost certainly, Macklemore was one of those purists, until he couldn’t be anymore because of his fame.) Last week, The Associated Press reported that the two were almost eliminated from competition in those categories altogether by subcommittee members who felt that they were, in essence, too pop — and, presumably, too white. Like a border militia tasked with passing judgment on infiltrators, those voters attempted a sort-of Grammy version of jury nullification, to no avail.

The idea was, of course, preposterous. Part of accepting hip-hop’s growth into a pop music juggernaut is accepting that its edges are fuzzier than they once were. “The Heist” is undeniably a hip-hop album, though Macklemore’s songs have more in common with those by rappers like Flo Rida or Pitbull, dance-music-friendly artists rarely heard on traditional hip-hop radio. But Flo Rida and Pitbull are not white.

And part of consuming the Grammys is accepting that, when it comes to niche categories, chaos will reign. (The Grammys are one of the few remaining contexts in which hip-hop could be called niche.) Voting in these cases remains a catastrophically broken process. Last week, Complex published an article by a Grammy voter detailing some parts of the system, which included this behind-the-scenes tidbit passed from one voter to the next: “Be careful about greenlighting an album by someone who was really famous if you don’t want to see that album win a Grammy.”