“George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People”
By admin on Sep 15, 2007 in General, Politics, VIP
The widely circulated clip of Kanye West deviating from script (during NBC’s live televised “Concert for Hurricane Relief”) to attack the government’s slow response to the disaster and to denounce Bush for not caring enough about blacks stirred the people of America in two ways.
Some stood with West, glad he articulated the sentiment of millions of black Americans today; others stood against him, outraged he’d use airtime allotted for the devastation of Katrina to publicly thrash Bush “in a disgusting display…offer[ing] an overflow of hatred…turning the relief program into his own personal soapbox,” Juicee News Daily declares.
Still, with Hip hop artists like Woo Child and The Legendary K.O. mimicking and supporting West’s outcry, you can be sure actions like cutting Kanye’s segment from the West Coast airing of the concert will not stifle America’s awareness of the hurt and injury the black community has faced in the era of Bush, Jr.
Does George Bush care about black people? A recent Washington Post article indicated that 72% of blacks believe he does not. This sentiment goes beyond the black community for even 26% of whites agree. People from various parts of the U.S. argue undoubtedly that race played a factor in the government’s lethargic response to the Hurricane, leaving thousands of poor blacks stranded and left behind in the flood and chaos. Rev. Al Sharpton states, “I feel race was a factor.” He asks if a category four hurricane that headed for Florida just last year can move the White House to action, why couldn’t this one. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, goes even farther to accuse the U.S. Army of bombing the New Orleans levees in order to “[get] rid of the poor.”
While Farrakhan’s brazen statement may be a little over-the-top or even unfounded, “being as the population is poor, black, and underrepresented in the federal government, had they more federal funds, they might have been able to reinforce the levees; thus, in a way, the federal government just let it happen,” one UC employee comments.
This past Saturday at the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March, Farrakhan took time during his speech to address the devastated communities of those areas hit by Katrina and condemned Bush for abandoning New Orleans. Farrakhan affirms, “I firmly believe…if [those] on the rooftops had blond hair, blue eyes and pale skin, something [would’ve] been done in a more timely manner. We charge America with criminal neglect.” At the same rally, Sharpton remarked that blacks are still struggling from discrimination, decades after the end of legal segregation.
A new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal shows that only 2% of African-Americans actually approve of Bush’s leadership. Maybe it has to do with the fact that funds needed toward affordable housing and urban renewal projects go to build highways and transportation systems to “accommodate middle class suburban commuters,” Sikivu Hutchinson of EurWeb online press remarks. Or maybe it’s Bush’s cutting of funds “to Section 8 housing vouchers,” when already, few federal housing programs remain. Perhaps, the blacks in the cities disapprove of the fact that the “socioeconomic gap between cities and suburbs has become…more pronounced since the advent of the…war on terrorism.” People pay for homeland security, which in turn, Hutchinson writes, “suck[s] up funds for urban reform initiatives.”
In a National Priorities Project study, it has been shown that in 2004, 30% of our income tax went to military and defense spending, while 3.7% went to education, 2.7% for nutrition and 2.1% for housing. In other words, Bush spent over 100 billion dollars fighting wars against supposed foreign terrorists and dictatorships because a very small portion of terrorists actually killed 2,752 Americans four years ago. Whereas, how many blacks in the U.S. have died due to poverty, inadequate health care, economic disparity, urban violence, state-inflicted violence and drug-related fatalities—much of which goes unreported?
There is still a hugely disproportionate amount of blacks in prison as compared to their white counterparts, for blacks as a whole only represent 12.3% of the U.S. population, yet make up 44% of the population in prison, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Perhaps Bush does not personally hate black people, but his history of political decision-making does not strongly show otherwise. He has shown by his political actions that he’d rather pump hundreds of billions of dollars into funding a war, chasing down a few exotic terrorists, than saving and improving the lives of millions of blacks who reside upon his own American soil.
As for the people, the racial rift of America has lasted centuries, and this most recent incident only serves to highlight that fact. Blacks’ feelings of neglect by the government haunt the black community til this day. Maybe Kanye West was a little ahead of himself, attacking the President for all the nation to see, but West most certainly is not ahead of his time, for the struggle of the black race has been with America for centuries and shows no signs of disappearing. Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica, (an organization established in 1977 that advocates for African and African-American issues), has lived in the time of segregation and still, 30 years later, he has moved his family out of America, too “worn down,” as he puts it, “by a…society that is racist [and] smugly blind to it.”
Source: www.heelpress.com
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