In the Los Angeles Times, newly hired correspondent Dexter Thomas warmly recalled hip-hop artist Kanye West dropping a rhetorical bomb on President George W. Bush ten years ago in a supposedly unifying fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims on NBC. It was headlined “When Kanye West told George Bush that Black Lives Matter.”
"I hate the way they portray us in the media,” West said, quavering. “If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. If you see a white family, it says they’re searching for food.” The paranoia grew. He declared “Those are my people down there … they’ve given [the military] permission to go down and shoot us.” Then he said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Thomas, just hired to cover "Black Twitter" -- apparently to not only describe it, but lionize it for a non-black audience -- described what happened next:
The video immediately went viral, or, as viral as anything could go before Twitter existed, and before Facebook had a News Feed. News of Kanye’s outburst spread in a way that seems almost archaic today: via video file attachments in emails, downloadable clips posted to blogs and word of mouth.
Kanye's comment even became the title of a song – “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” by the hip-hop group K-OTIX. Frustrated with watching the footage, the group borrowed the beat from Kanye West’s “Gold Digger,” and elaborated on Kanye’s statements. “I guess Bush said [blacks have] been used to dying,” one rapped.
....Looking back 10 years later, that song’s virality is proof of the resonance that Kanye’s words had for so many people. Downloading, and listening to the song, became a way to celebrate the fact that someone had finally managed to broadcast a collective sentiment felt by millions: black lives matter.
The gasp of astonishment and jubilation that Randle let out echoed what many black people said when they saw that broadcast: “Oh my God … he said it!” [Italics his.]
But Thomas was unhappy that while West defended himself at the time, after President Bush described it as "one of the most disgusting moments of my presidency,” West reconsidered.
But in 2010, Kanye West walked back his words – not quite apologizing, as Today show host Matt Lauer pressured him to do, but empathizing with the former president. “I would tell George Bush, in my moment of frustration, that I didn’t have the grounds to call him a racist,” he said.
Many in the hip-hop community did not feel that an apology was necessary. In an interview with MTV, then-online editor of hip-hop magazine The Source said that Kanye seemed like he was “pandering to people that shouldn’t matter to him.” One journalist called Kanye’s change of heart “disappointing.”
And thus, a historical chapter in hip-hop protest history closed with an ignominious footnote. Yeezus had forsaken us.
Thomas concluded that things are so much different on the Internet since 2005, and since 2010. The ascent of a critical mass of black voices on Twitter and other social-media sites like Instagram makes the Black Lives Matter patter stick:
Black Twitter is impossible to ignore. If a reporter tries to do so, Black Twitter will notice – and correct them. And if rappers want to speak out about injustice, they know that there is a chorus of voices that will back them up (or, push them to go further).
But looking back at Kanye’s comments, it’s easy to focus on his pitch, and miss the wind-up. Moments before delivering that infamous line, Kanye spoke on unfair media representation of blacks, the militarization of policing of black citizens, and even the link between poverty, blackness and unfair government policies – all topics that have been brought into the spotlight by the Black Lives Matter movement.
Certainly, the Black Lives Matter movement does not owe Kanye any debts. Kanye, for better or for worse, ultimately backed down on his challenge to Bush – and by extension, to America – to reckon with the country’s racism. But more than anything else, that’s probably evidence of a fact that was just as true in 2005 as it is in 2015: Real change does not come from superstars. It comes from the people.
