Rick does the math

Yesterday, I quoted the WSWS quoting HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson:

Jackson predicted New Orleans would slowly bring back as many as 375,000 people, but that only 35 to 40 percent of the population would be black. Prior to Hurricane Katrina the city had nearly 500,000 residents, more than two-thirds of whom were African-American.

My friend Rick, the guy who did most of the work on my solar project, has done the math [update, corrected by brother Jim--corrections in red]:

500,000 people, 2/3rds black, means 330,000 blacks, 220,000 whites 333,333 blacks, 166,667 whites
375,000 people, 35% black, means 131,250 blacks, 243,750 whites
375,000 people, 40% black, means 150,000 blacks, 225,000 whites

I seem to remember that the evacuation of refugees after Katrina was something on the order of 100,000 people, or 20% of the pre-storm population. So if they're planning on displacing 180-200k blacks, they're planning on almost half of those being people who are NOT indigent, in that they had the means to evacuate themselves. Even some of those who were evacuated are homeowners, so they have some incentive, even responsibility to return. These numbers are too big to attribute to attrition, it'll take active measures to reduce the black population by that much. I wonder what they're planning?

So, in addition to displacing 180,000 to 198,750 blacks, he's planning on 5,000 to 23,750 58,333 to 77,083 whites or other non-blacks migrating INTO New Orleans.

This kind of Ethnic cleansing, coupled with an incentive for other more favored groups to migrate into the area, has precedent. China encouraged the Han (majority) ethnic group to migrate into Tibet and set up businesses there. Saddam Hussein encouraged Arabs to move into the Kirkuk as fast as he could displace the Kurds and Turkmen. Israel started building residential settlements in the occupied territories almost before the dust settled from the 1967 war...

So it is actually worse than Rick thought!

For that matter, the Homestead Act of 1862 provided incentives for mostly white settlers to move into lands inhabited mostly by Native Americans.