"Media sophisticates commenting on Katrina at the time were squeamish about citing the race factor, but one person noted the elephant in the flooded living room. Lee shows the classic clip of pop star Kanye West going on TV, apparently for an innocuous charity broadcast and breaking with the script to say: "The president doesn't care about black people." Next to him, comedy star Mike Myers flinches and half-turns to him, for a fraction of a second appearing mutely to implore West to qualify the statement in some way, clearly panicking at being associated with these views. An unmissable moment of celeb-career anxiety.
Lee also revives the wince-making memory of Barbara Bush, former First Lady and current First Mom, who gave a notorious interview, superciliously claiming that evacuees moved out to prosperous Texas - many parted from their families - were actually getting a nice break.
Mrs Bush disgraced herself, yet Lee boldly declares that plenty of evacuees in Texas and Utah found that there was more for them there in terms of education and jobs than in New Orleans - and maybe they were being loyal to a place that was holding them back."
- Read more on Spike Lee's 4-hour documentary on Post-Katrina New Orleans
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3 comments:
good reporting but should you not have placed the quote in quotation marks to show its source in the link below?it was only on following the link i learnt it wssd the source of the nice essay
Oversight. It was italicised & coloured blue like other extracts on the page, though.
Quotation marks now incorporated.
Thanks,
MW
Race was a factor in the post Katrina mess as much as the local government's ineptitude. personally, I feel the issue of race was overplayed; what happened during Katrina could have happened in any area of low socioeconomic status, and there are plenty of them in United States.
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