Comedic actor Mike Myers recently spoke about one of the most notorious on-camera moments. The star of the Austin Powers and Shrek films spoke to GQ about his infamous 2005 appearance on a telethon to raise money for victims of Hurricane Katrina in the wake of that disaster. Myers was paired with rapper Kanye West, who delivered his widely-quoted edict that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” during that moment in the live broadcast. In an interview for the June issue of GQ, Myers was asked about his shocked expression during West’s statements at the time, and the actor says he was “super proud” to have been next to the mercurial rap star as West spoke truth.
“For me, it isn’t about the look of embarrassment on my face, it is truly about the injustice that was happening in New Orleans,” Myers explains. “I don’t mind answering the question but the emphasis of it being that I’m the guy next to the guy who spoke a truth.”
“I assume that George Bush does care about black people—I mean I don’t know him, I’m going to make that assumption—but I can definitively say that it appeared to me watching television that had that been white people, the government would have been there faster,” he added. “And so to me that’s really the point—the look on my face is, to me, almost insulting to the true essence of what went down in New Orleans.”
Myers comments are almost a decade after-the-fact, long after the moment has become more of a pop culture joke than a cultural or political flash point. And too often, black issues and perspectives require some type of white endorsement for white or other non-black people to take them seriously. But Myers’ candid comments regarding that unscripted television moment only amplifies what’s too often the case with Kanye West: people allow the way he speaks his mind to detract from what he is actually saying.
At the time of his outburst, I was critical of West—not because of what he said, but because of how he said it. I wanted Yeezy to be more thoughtful in addressing the ineptitude and neglect of the Bush administration’s Katrina response; for him to clearly articulate and consistently attack the president’s failings. But West’s statement was no less valid just because it was framed in a way that made me or other viewers uncomfortable. He’s Kanye West, not Cornel West—it’s not his job to pretend to be a pundit. And everything, from the Katrina disaster to George Zimmerman to the state of the urban education system offers credence to West’s words, even years later.
So kudos to Mike Myers for understanding what West was saying and for stating what a lot of non-black people would be too uncomfortable to publicly admit. But, the next step is understanding that the neglect of and attacks on the African American community were not limited to Bush and Katrina. Nine years later and with a black man in the Oval Office, we still have to ask:
Does America care about black people?
