“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West says, eyes dead-locked on the camera.

Comedian Mike Meyers looks at him in disbelief. There is a moment of awkward uncertainty before the camera jumps away, leaving Meyers wide-eyed and mid-sentence.

Speaking on NBC’s telethon in support of the Red Cross recovery efforts five days after Hurricane Katrina drowned the city of New Orleans, West voiced what many have since decided--the government’s inadequate response to Katrina was due, in large part, to the fact that most of those hit hardest were poor, and nearly all were black.

In his relentless exploration of the social fault lines Katrina reminded every American still exist, Michael Dyson examines the Bush Administration’s reaction to Katrina in his book Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. He makes it clear that the federal government was lethally passive in its initial response to the waterlogged city. President Bush flew over New Orleans as it flooded, to attend Senator McCain’s birthday party in Arizona. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went to a Padres game in San Diego 24 hours after Katrina hit. The head of FEMA in New Orleans didn’t know until 24 hours after the media flooded America with images of Superdome horrors that they were out of supplies, over-crowded, unsafe, and drastically short on evacuation vehicles. President Bush even declared that there had been no warning of levee failure, even though it was his administration that dealt the heaviest cuts in levee-repair and maintenance funding that the area had ever seen.

Dyson also points out that much of the chaos resulted from the concentrated poverty that existed in New Orleans. The city’s poverty rate was 73% higher than the national average, nearly 68% of its population was black, and one in seven in the greater New Orleans area had no access to a car, thus having no way out of the city besides public transportation or a lift from a friend. Dyson argues that poverty, especially to this degree, “is fed in part by…public policy decisions that directly impact how many people are poor and how long they remain that way.”

Southern blacks also have a history of voting Democrat—in 2000 Bush got eight percent of the black vote, and in 2004, he topped out at 11 percent.

Dyson lays out the aftermath of Katrina for what it was. More than a breakdown of levees and emergency response systems, Katrina revealed the failure of the Bush Administration to provide the most basic of promises between a government and its people. Thousands waited for the cavalry to come and for the protection and help every one of us expects should chaos descend. They waited for the rescue workers and the helicopters, the fresh water and insulin, the dry clothes and antiseptic. They waited for their country to help them. And nothing came. Empty silence filled the space where the United States Government should have stood, and it was a louder, more dangerous silence than Katrina’s entire Category 5 wrath had been.

And in this failure, Dyson argues, lies the failure of democracy.