"White Privilege II" is a song by American hip hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis from their second album This Unruly Mess I've Made (2016).

The song comments on the impunity with which white police in the United States are free to take black lives, with "a shield, a gun with gloves and hands that gives an alibi.

"[4] Arguing his success is "the product of the same system that let off Darren Wilson," a police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown,[1] Macklemore raps that, "one thing the American dream fails to mention, is that I was many steps ahead to begin with".

"[6][7] Forrest Wickman, writing for Slate, analyzes the song as having multiple sections that often bear a different critical viewpoint (narrator) from Macklemore himself.

"[2] The first verse in his own voice, where Macklemore raps about his struggle to find his place in the protest movement, conscious that his commercial success in hip-hop is at least partially a product of white privilege.

He names the performers Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, and Elvis Presley as having "exploited and stolen the music, the moment / the magic, the passion, the fashion you toyed with / the culture was never yours to make better."

[2] Meera Jagannathan of the New York Daily News noted that Iggy Azalea was blindsided, tweeting a fan, "he shouldn't have spent the last three years having friendly convos and taking pictures together at events, etc.

"[2] In this verse, as Black Lives Matter protesters chant outside, the "mom" tells Macklemore: You're the only hip hop I let my kids listen to, because you get it.

Like all the guns and the drugs, the bitches and hoes, and the gangs and the thugs, even the protest outside, so sad and so dumb – if the cop pulls you over, it's your fault if you run!Wickman notes the "irony" with which many fans initially seemed to endorse the mom's comments literally on song interpretation site Genius, with such annotations as, "Macklemore makes positive hip-hop and doesn't romanticize bad behavior like most rappers do.

"[10] In his review, Wickman said that "White Privilege II" is not "a great song, but as a think piece it's not terrible...the best thing Macklemore does is giving Black Lives Matter protesters (along with up-and-coming singer Jamila Woods) the last word.