Kanye West apologises for the best thing he's ever done

Kanye West yet again has done something inexplicable, by apologising for pretty much the best thing he’s ever done: slagging George W. Bush on live TV.

You might remember from 5 years ago the moment that broke from the script in a televised charity ‘give-money-cos-the-government-can’t-be-arsed-athon’, to declare “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

But now, he’s felt it necessary to go on US TV to apologise to Bush:

“I would tell George Bush, in my moment of frustration, I didn’t have the grounds to call him a racist. But I believe that in a situation of high emotion like that, we as human beings don’t always choose the right words. And that’s why I’m here.”

In a radio interview he even went further:

The comments come after Bush referred West’s comments in 2005 as “the most disgusting moment of my Presidency.”

It’s worth noting that the whole story has become about how Kanye called Bush “a racist” when he actually said no such thing. When this was pointed out to him he said that’s what it had meant to him.

“I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business’. It’s another to say, “This man’s a racist”. I resent it, it’s not true and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency . . . The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Hurricane Katrina represented an all-time low.”

You know what would be way worse than this? Getting slagged on telly

At the time, Kanye’s comments were heard round the world, and he became a hero to many as they saw the outrageous response by the US government to Hurricane Katrina. They were sampled and reused again and again.  The fact that he’s climbed down from the remarks 5 years later will be a big disappointment for the many people who respected him for speaking his mind.

The reason for that is that the way the government handled the destruction of New Orleans was racist. New Orleans at the time was one of the poorest cities in the US, with a 67% black population. When it was clear that a disastrous hurricane (likely to have been made worse by the heating of the ocean’s surface by climate change) was going to hit, the poor majority, who didn’t own cars they could use to leave, were left to fend for themselves. At least 1836 people died as a result, and five years later refugees are dispersed across the US, unable to return. The reason why they haven’t been able to go home is that the wealthy and the their friends in government saw it as an opportunity to transform the city, evict the people that live there, and seize the land where their homes were to make a profit at their expense.

Even worse than their inaction was the action that Bush’s government did take. As they left people to starve or die of thirst, people were forced to fend for themselves to survive. They did this by taking what they needed from abandoned stores. But the US military was deployed to protect private property rather than human life, shooting the “looters” who the media dutifully condemned with made up stories of murder and violence. Vigilantes and cops shot and killed those trying to flee the disaster, under the watch of President Bush.

The truth of the matter is that George Bush doesn’t care about anybody except the wealthy elite that put him in power in the first place. What happened in New Orleans was disaster capitalism in action – using a crisis as an opportunity to transform the face of the city in favour of the rich. Kanye West seemed to get that at one point (see his comments from 3 years ago below), but now he’s backed away. You also can’t deny that part of what happened was racism, that it was a fact that the government, headed by Bush, didn’t care about the black people of New Orleans.

It’s even more disappointing that the thing that seems to have prompted Kanye to take this step is the racist abuse he faced as a result of his madcap behaviour at the VMA awards when he interrupted Taylor Swift getting the best video prize. After that, many ignorant white people in the US labeled him a racist, and accusation that’s patently ridiculous. Yes, it was daft and strange what he did, but the fact that some claimed it was motivated by a hatred of white people says more about them than it does about Kanye West.

One infamous Twitter response to the VMA awards

With the US electing its first ever black President to succeed Bush, there is a huge backlash of racial unease underway in the US. Part of the same politics was what motivated the furious backlash against Kanye for something that didn’t really matter. But the idiots saw a classic racist script of innocent white womanhood being violated by a black man, and went berserk, accusing him of racism. Rude, yes. In the words of Obama, a “jackass”, yes. But racist, no.

This continued pressure on him though has pushed Kanye into capitulating, which is sad and disappointing from someone who sometimes shows some flashes of social conscience and is from a family of Black Panthers.

Of course, what all the fuss ignores is the fact that Bush felt getting slagged on telly was the worst moment of his Presidency. Not the hundreds of thousands of people that died as a result of his actions in Iraq. Not the economic crisis which he helped create by allowing finance capital run riot. Not the the thousands that died in New Orleans. All these pale into insignificance compared to a famous rapper giving you some lip on TV.

Bush doesn’t deserve apologies, he deserves to be put on trial for the crimes committed by his regime.

Bonus: There’s obviously a lot more we could go into about why Bush is racist, such as his policies on affirmative action, his party’s approach to racist white southern voters, or the fact that he was only able to seize power in the first place by systematically disenfranchising black voters. But we’ll leave you with these two slightly more banal examples, firstly by him and then by his mum.