![mary j blidge hate it or love it mary j blidge hate it or love it](https://media2.fdncms.com/riverfronttimes/imager/u/original/2667040/mary_j_blige_lilith_fair_live.jpg)
Certainly many black viewers of that Friday’s NBC benefit, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, understood what motivated Kanye West’s now famous outburst. That day, President Bush toured the area, and, that same day, concerned about looting, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco gave shoot-to-kill orders. But it was Friday, September 2, before any large-scale rescue began. Four days of horror passed as nothing substantial happened to rescue the sixty thousand black and poor residents of neighborhoods like the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, many living in the top floors and on the roofs of flooded homes.įifty levees had failed Monday, August 29. All of America (and the world) watched while New Orleans residents crowded into the Superdome (twenty-six thousand in an emergency facility set up for a few hundred) and waited on rooftops for help. In her interviews in the months after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, Blige seemed willing to talk publicly about issues in a way she’d rarely done before. We would have been those people in New Orleans, the people who couldn’t get out, the people who died.” That’s how it’s been for years… I haven’t seen anything change. Blige told the Guardian journalist Zoe Williams in late 2005. “E verybody should look at Katrina,” Mary J. “I listen to Mary for her conviction and honesty her voice is secondary to the emotion she conveys in her raw portrayal of life.” - Natasha Ria El-Scari, poet, Cave Canem Fellow