Kayne West, the hip-hop artist that scored big in this year's MTV Video Music Awards, is refusing to back down following his statement about President Bush at the Katrina benefit concert two weeks ago. Standing next to Mike Myers, West would not obey the transcript:
"George Bush does not care about black people."
On the Ellen DeGeneres Show today Kayne West again insisted that there were warnings ahead of time, and that African-Americans have been an after-thought as far as national priorities are concerned (contact music)
"Back in the days when it was time to clean the kitchen I would try to sweep the dust under the kitchen sink instead of really taking care of it, and if you spilled something on that floor all that dust came right up in front of your face. That's basically what the flood did. ...They have been trying to sweep us (African-Americans) under the kitchen sink and it was so in people's faces and so on TV... that they couldn't even hide it any more. ...Down there, people are living below the poverty level to start off with, before this happened. ...A year ago I was on tour with Usher and we had a hurricane hit Florida and everybody was saying, 'If this hurricane went to Louisiana, if it went to Mississippi, they wouldn't be able to handle it.' (That was) a year ago - and there was nothing done about it."
In my view, this has more to do with poverty than race. I hate to beat a dead horse, but it further acknowledges John Edwards' point about the two Americas we live in: one for the fortunate few and then one for the rest of us. West may have been wrong to play the race card -- even though a large percentage of the people stranded were black -- but he was correct about the warning signs, and the White House's refusal to add federal subsidies to their budget to repair the levees. Speaking of West and DeGeneres, each of them have been on the cover of Time Magazine, with West appearing on it more recently. On the Blog Critics web site, they analyze how similar the two photos were. Look at this:
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