Kanye West says 'George Bush doesn't care about Black people' during NBC's Hurricane Katrina telethon

Why it matters

September 2, 2005. NBC aired a live one-hour fundraiser called "A Concert for Hurricane Relief." The hurricane was Katrina, which had made landfall in Louisiana four days earlier and which the federal response was, by that night, visibly catastrophically failing. Kanye West was on the broadcast paired with Mike Myers, reading from a teleprompter about the impact on Black communities in New Orleans. Kanye departed from the script. He looked at the camera. He said, in a single, halting, audibly nervous take: "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." NBC cut to commercial. The phrase, by morning, was front-page news in every American newspaper. It is one of the defining moments of late-2000s American political culture, the moment a popular musician used a live network broadcast to say what a substantial section of the country was already thinking. George W. Bush later wrote in his memoir that the moment was one of the lowest of his presidency. You can debate whether the moment did more for Kanye's career than for the federal response. Almost certainly both things are true. The moment is still in the public record. Kanye put it there.