So Kanye West went off-script while appearing on a hurricane relief benefit last night. Visibly shaken because of the situation and struggling through his words, he, among other things, took the media to task for portraying blacks in New Orleans as "looting" when they took food from grocery stores but said that whites had "found" food at stores. Apparently there had been a story on Yahoo and other sites with two pictures, one of white people and the other of black people, that had captions which showed this bias-Yahoo took it down and apologized, as I understand it. Kanye also admitted his own slowness to react, saying he had gone shopping before donating, but now that he is aware of the severity of the situation he was getting on the phone with his manager to figure out the maximum he could donate. Standing next to commedian Mike Myers, who was obviously surprised by Kanye's remarks, he also lamented orders given to troops to shoot to kill if necessary, and made the statement that "George Bush doesn't care about black people"-after which NBC cut to another host, commedian Chris Tucker. NBC later released a statement saying Kanye's views in no way reflected those of the network and that it would be "most unfortunate" if efforts of millions of Americans to help were "overshadowed by one person's opinion"

To many, Kanye's remarks no doubt seemed inappropriate, and to many others, NBC's reaction to them were censorship. I am kinda glad that Kanye said what he said. I don't agree that Pres. Bush doesn't care about black people, but it has been obvious that the relief effort of the federal government has been quite flawed, and the questions raised about whether the race and socioeconomic status of the victims may have influenced the response, consciously or otherwise, are valid. Calling out the looting/surviving distinction and questioning the orders concerning the use of force against the hurricane victims was also warranted. Nevertheless, I also do not nec. think that what NBC did was wrong either. While Kanye's comments were (mostly) on point in my opinion, from the standpoint of the benefit organizers, it wasn't the time or place. Their purpose was to raise money and such potentially divisive comments, even if they were true or valid, might hurt that effort, which would be bad for the victims. I guess its a dilemma-I'm glad Kanye said most of what he said, but I don't think that the venue he used to say it was the right one, but I don't know where else he would have found such a proper venue to make those statements and have them heard as widely as they were last night. I guess Kanye and NBC were both doing the right thing, as they each saw it, though that caused them to cross purposes.