Sermons of the Side Eye blogger Judnikki, who is black, agrees with Noz in theory about the amorality of art appreciation. “Fuck moralizing art,” she wrote, in a self-described “rant” on Twitter. But then she raised the problem of emotional perspective—a problem that speaks to B.Dot’s use of the all-caps, implicitly exclusive “MY.” There is an aspect of ownership in black people’s relationship to black music, she says, even if they don’t choose it, because whites in America have for so long pigeonholed the black experience. “When ppl have a history of being stereotyped and generalized they lose that sense of individual privilege …” It’s impossible, Judnikki argues, for her to divorce herself from Chief Keef’s blackness—to not see her own reflected in it. American society won’t let her. So it’s impossible for her to listen to his music free of an agenda. Thus, she does apply moral concerns to her experience of art, as much as she doesn’t want to. “Motherfuckers see us as ONE fucking unit and THAT is what we want ‘white bloggers’ to understand. Someone sees Waka and then kills Treyvon … Y’all don’t know that fuckin’ struggle of being judged based on someone else’s actions and you NEVER will ... You will never understand. Never feel the pain, shame, guilt … You get to be just you. But in America no matter how hard I try someone is ALWAYS judgin based on my skin and when the Chief Keefs appear, people are thinking OMG look at what years of oppression and demoralization have done to a group. They think: niggers.”

That is some depressing truth right there. Sad as it is, with its underlying theme of an unbridgeable divide between races and its fatalistic view of the American project—at least for our current generation—I’m glad she wrote it. For me, a white person, a rap fan who does in fact enjoy Chief Keef’s album, for musical reasons, much the same as I enjoy Waka Flocka Flame’s music, even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message—a person who likes to think that I can compartmentalize various elements of artistic expression, and appreciate music without any agenda—it’s worth giving hard thought to what it means that a black person is saying that she can’t. It’s worth ruminating on how deeply and insidiously white privilege and the black lack thereof infect every aspect of life in America—even something as simple as enjoying a good pop song.

In his essay “Many Thousands Gone,” from Notes of A Native Son, James Baldwin asserts that Bigger Thomas, the scared, hateful, murderous protagonist of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” is the prototypical image of blackness in America—and that this affects us all. “The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro’s heart,” Baldwin writes, “and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.” That’s the fatalism in Judnikki’s rant: The sense of being trapped in a world where she respects the idea of a listener being able to appreciate Chief Keef’s music in a vacuum—art for art’s sake, in and of itself—but can’t make that idea jibe with her reality. Theories are good in theory, until life gets in the way.

Well-meaning white people who like violent rap music will argue against the notion that it inspires real-life violence among those who listen to it. I will argue this. But what are we to say when a black person says, “Someone sees Waka and then kills Treyvon.” And we know that she sees Trayvon’s face on the TV news and can’t not see her own face in his, and thus see her own face in Chief Keef’s, because she believes, she knows, that much of her country sees, still sees, all black faces as the same. We want it to be different, us well-meaning white people. Maybe that’s even part of why we listen to rap music, or part of why we started to, anyway, because we want to do our best to make amends, to bridge the divide. We don’t want to be outsiders; we don’t want for there to be such a thing as outsiders. We want it to be different, but it’s not.