In September 2005, Kanye West made the remark during NBC's live telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief, departing from the scripted appeal to criticise the federal response to the disaster in New Orleans. The broadcast moment was replayed on news programmes and quickly clipped for online sharing, becoming one of the most quoted lines of the decade. It endures because it condenses a wider argument about race, disaster relief, and political accountability into a single direct sentence that still fits short-form video and reaction edits.