Bruno Mars found himself at the center of a fierce online debate after the 32-year-old Grammy-winning musician was accused of creating music that culturally appropriated black culture — but his fans didn’t waste any time coming to his defense.
The online debate began after comments that writer Seren Sensei made in a video for Youtube’s The Grapevine went viral .
“ Bruno Mars 100 percent is a cultural appropriator ,” she said on the popular roundtable web-series, which covers identity, entertainment and politics from the black millennial perspective. Sensei continued, “He is not black, at all, and he plays up his racial ambiguity to cross genres.”
Mars was born in Honolulu to a Filipino mother and a father who is half Puerto Rican and half Ashkenazi Jewish.
 “What Bruno Mars does, is he takes pre-existing work and he just completely, word-for-word recreates it, extrapolates it,” she argued, referencing the fact that he makes music that would fit into traditional black genres like R&B, funk, soul, and hip-hop.
“Bruno Mars has an Album of the Year Grammy and Prince never won an Album of the Year Grammy,” she continued. “The issue is we want our black culture from non-black bodies.”