When Kanye West stated, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” last week during an NBC telethon, the hip hop community didn’t seem outraged. In fact, many of hip-hop’s elite are standing firmly behind The College Dropout.
“We can’t wait around for the government to help. We’re not waiting, we’re taking action,”Diddy told MTV.com. “We can find money to bomb people oversees, but not to help our brothers and sisters?”
Atlantic Records artist Twista also holds a similar viewpoint.
“Do you look at us as less than human?’ The response said something. Any other people, people [suffering a catastrophe,] you get people from all over the world to come and jump right on [the problem]. But you get mostly poor and black people, and we get the slow response.”
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The most vocal opinions came from southern rap icons TI and Mississippi’s native son David Banner
”They said they couldn’t get down there for different reasons, but those were just excuses,”Banner said of the U.S. government in Ozone magazine. ”I sent a tour bus full of water down there. My bus driver paid with his own Mastercard. I told him to go ahead and buy whatever they needed and I’d pay him back. He filled the tour bus up twice with water, food, and supplies before the American government did. He drove down there from Memphis. Then I came down there myself and I sat and signed autographs and passed out water to the kids for four, five hours myself. How can David Banner, a so-called “gangsta rapper,” react quicker to a crisis than our own government?”
TI also called out the hip-hop community, encouraging the major players in the game to put up or shut up.
“I called everybody’s bluff who be talking all that ballin’ sh–,”T.I. told MTV.com. “Popping all them bottles in the club … Basically, I told everybody to put their money where their mouths are, and if you ain’t got no money to give to the cause, I don’t want to hear that sh– no more.”
