A conservative backlash has mounted against entertainer Kanye West after the rapper/producer recently spoke out against President Bush and the treatment of African Americas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. On a live telecast Friday on NBC, West concluded an unprepared, unrehearsed speech by saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
The statement, along with sharp words of criticism for the media and government, has raised ire in many and a groundswell of support in others. (Click here to read the previous report.)
“In a disgusting display, West strayed from his prepared script to offer an overflow of hatred from his mouth, taking the spotlight off of the matter at hand, turning the relief program into his own personal soapbox,” said Juicee News, a site that mixes personal commentary with daily reporting. “Whether or not anyone agrees with Mr. West… it was clear that now was not the time to voice such harsh opinions.”
The American Daily, another news service, said that West spoke out with an uninformed opinion on national television.
American Daily Sher Zieve said, “Showing yet again that leftists have raised a generation of ignorant, malicious and increasingly incompetent-to-comment-on-virtually-anything ‘adults,’ Kanye West an ostensible ‘rapper’ joined the neverending-since-2000 Bush bash fest.”
Despite his critics, a plethora of Black leaders are supporting West, including civil rights leader Randall Robinson, Jesse Jackson and others like Jesse Jackson, Congressman: ‘‘Today I saw 5000 African Americans on the I-10 causeway, desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying. It looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship. It was so ugly and so obvious. Have we missed this catastrophe because of indifference and ineptitude, or is it a combination of the both? We have great tolerance for black suffering and black marginalisation. And today those who are suffering the most, in fact, in New Orleans certainly are black people.”
West’s commentary prompted NBC censors to cut the telecast without re-airing it on the West Coast.
Los Angeles Times newspaper also supported West’s freedom of speech and condemned NBC for cutting the West Coast telecast. “NBC cut the Grammy Award-winning rapper`s remark: ‘George Bush doesn`t care about Black people,’ from the West Coast tape of its Friday night telethon leaving the viewers with nothing more than ‘a sterile, self-serving corporate broadcast,’ the Times stated in an editorial.
