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during a live telethon last week, claiming emergency services would have acted

quicker following Hurricane Katrina if the victims of the storm were white.

West shocked America last week when he accused President George W

Bush of racism for not acting quicker to help stranded African-Americans in

Louisiana and Mississippi.

And now Jackson has taken his lead as he promotes new movie The Man. He says, "Those people in New Orleans, the majority of them were black and

that speaks to the fact that those were the people who couldn't afford to

evacuate.

"They didn't have cars, they didn't have the means to get out and because the

response to the emergency was so slow, it's easy to look at it and say, 'Wow,

if there were white people trapped in that place, I betcha they'd gotten there

sooner.'"

But Jackson hopes the fact that relief wasn't more immediate when the

hurricane hit is just a huge mistake--and not a racist act.

He adds, "The hard thing to say is, 'Look, we made a mistake, we didn't do

the right thing fast enough.' That's the problem right now."

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