Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Richards

Richards is trying to sound like a public-minded entertainer, but the sentence keeps betraying how unsteady his footing is. It begins with “disturbance,” a vague, TV-friendly word that smooths Katrina’s brutality into background static. Then the key tell: “how black feel.” The missing “people” is more than a grammatical slip; it reduces a community to a monolith while also placing Richards outside it, peering in. He’s gesturing toward Black anger and grief as a thing he’s heard about, not a reality he’s accountable to.

The repeated “you know” and the clotted phrasing read like a man improvising morality in real time, assembling empathy out of stock parts. And when he pivots to “many of the comics, many of performers,” the focus shifts from the disaster’s victims to showbiz’s response. Charity becomes the headline. The subtext is reputational: look, entertainers care; look, we’re doing something. It’s less a reckoning with why Katrina hit Black residents so hard - neglect, segregation, government failure - than a reassurance that the culture industry is on the case with benefit shows and check-writing.

Context matters: Katrina wasn’t just a storm; it was a televised exposure of racialized abandonment, followed by years of anger at institutions that treated Black suffering as disposable. Richards’ quote tries to enter that conversation while sidestepping its sharpest edges. The intent may be solidarity, but the effect is a familiar deflection: turn structural harm into a fundraising narrative, where the emotional center is the helpers, not the harmed.