There is no shortage of opinions on Macklemore. This was true even before last Friday’s silliness at EMP involving the now famous “witches nose,” wig and fake beard. It can be fairly reasonably argued that Macklemore has not helped his own cause in this regard—first, by becoming an outrageously famous white rapper—and then by making some pretty big P.R. mistakes along the way. Some argued that the revised version of “Wing$” that debuted as a music video at last year’s NBA All-Star Game was his sell-out moment. When he publically apologized to Kendrick Lamar for winning the Grammy for Best Rap Album earlier this year, many questioned his integrity yet again. The comedian Al Madrigal used a HateSong interview to elaborate his considerable dislike for “Thrift Shop.” Madrigal seemed mostly upset because he had to explain some of the dirtier lyrics in the radio-friendly version to his ten-year old son.

So this most recent blunder, and let’s all agree that it was a blunder, is just the latest installment. I don’t think Macklemore intended to offend anyone, and this is exactly what he argues on his official website. The dude seems genuinely, and sometimes naively, intent on having a fun time. The real question is this: why wasn’t he or anyone of his people capable of recognizing that this costume was radically insensitive? To some it may be obvious that the costume was immensely offensive, to others it must not be. I myself was a little fuzzy on what all the fuss was, so I texted my friend Spek to get the answer. I wrote, “Can you explain to me, what other than bad taste, is offensive about Macklemore’s costume?” This was his response:

Those are all stereotypes used to dehumanize Jews for centuries. The hook nose, in particular, has become a symbol of someone untrustworthy and stingy, and the physical features he had on display were the same ones Germans singled out in the 30s.

Macklemore and his crew made a mistake of ignorance, and perhaps Macklemore could have emphasized this point a bit more in his apology, but nonetheless, it was an honest mistake. We need to individually, and as a larger culture, allow our public figures to make mistakes and learn from them. Macklemore is not a bad guy, regardless of what you think of his music. He’s still learning to handle his rapid ascent to stardom. Some of that learning is going to be done the hard way, taking the tough criticism of the outraged internetters. But these outraged people have something to learn too.

The editors of N+1 published an article, Against the Outrage Machine, in issue 18 that aptly addresses this problem. It opens:

A strange mania governs the people of our great nation, a mania that these days results in many individual and collective miseries. This is the love of opinion, of free speech—a furious mania for free, spoken opinion. It exhausts us. We are aware that to say so (freely! our opinion!) makes us hypocrites. We are also aware that America’s hatred of hypocrisy is one of the few passions to rival its love of free speech—as if the ideal citizen must see something, say something, and it must be the same thing, all the time. But we’ll be hypocrites because we’re tired, and we want eventually to stop talking.

It ends:

Scroll down your Facebook feed and see if you don’t see one ditto after another. So many people with “good” or “bad politics,” delivered with conviction to rage or applause; so little doubt, error, falsifiability—surely the criteria by which anything true, or democratic, could ever be found.

We’re all going to be ignorant about something, we’re all going to make mistakes. Some part of the forgiveness of this ignorance and these mistakes must be an investment of acceptance, and desire in learning what it was that we didn’t know that led us to making the mistake in the first place.