To all those who jumped on the "IT WAS ALL AN ANTI-BLACK CONSPIRACY" and the "THOSE AMERICANS ARE SUCH RACISTS" band wagons, take a deep breath and read the facts below.
Katrina Death Stats Contradict Racial Complaints
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Monday, Dec. 12, 2005
The popular perception that African-Americans living in New
Orleans were disproportionately victimized by the government's botched
Hurricane Katrina rescue effort turns out not to be true - at
least according to preliminary death statistics released by the state
of Louisiana.
On Wednesday, Congress heard dramatic testimony from black
Katrina survivors, who complained that racism drove the federal rescue
efforts and resulted in an unnecessarily high number of African-American
deaths.
"People were allowed to die," storm survivor Leah Hodges
testified, telling a House panel that black residents of New Orleans had
been victims of "genocide and ethnic cleansing."
But preliminary figures compiled by the morgue in St. Gabriel,
Louisiana, which is the primary facility handling the bodies of
Katrina deceased, show that a majority of the dead in New Orleans and
surrounding parishes were actually not black.
Of the 883 bodies processed so far by medical examiners at St.
Gabriel, 562 have been identified by race. Slightly less than half that
number 48 percent - are African-American.
Forty-one percent are white, 8 percent unknown and 2 percent
Hispanic.
The remarkable numbers, which undermine claims that Katrina
rescue efforts were somehow infused by racism, have been completely
ignored by the national media, with only the Lousiana-based news web site, The Bayou Buzz, devoting any coverage at all to the story.
The surprisingly low death rate for black Katrina victims comes
despite the fact that New Orleans itself was more than two-thirds black
[67 percent] when the storm hit. White residents made up less than a
third [28 percent] of the city's population, according to U.S. Census
bureau numbers.
The two hardest hit areas were Orleans parish, which is the city
itself- with 720 people killed by Katrina - and St. Bernard parish,
with 123 dead.
St. Bernard parish is 88 percent white, but the total population
before the storm was just 65,554 people. The city of New Orleans, on
the other hand, had 484,674 people before the storm, 67 percent of whom
were black.
The two populations combined were still over 60 percent black -
twelve points higher than the percentage of black residents killed by
Katrina.
To view the statistics on Katrina dead released by the state of
Louisiana, go to:
http://www.dhh.louisiana.gov/offices/publications/pubs-
145/DECEASED%20Victims%20released_11-14-2005_publication.pdf
