For almost two years now, since Oct. 7, 2023, the world has watched in horror the genocide that has taken place in Gaza at the hands of the U.S.-backed Zionist regime. The Palestinian Ministry of Health recorded on August 23 that over 62,600 Gazans have been martyred and over 157,600 have been injured since Oct. 7. The Government Media Office in Gaza reports that 1.3 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced by this genocide, another form of ethnic cleansing. (Resistance News Network)

Ethnic cleansing is nothing new when it comes to settler colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism. Just ask any Indigenous person whose ancestors suffered genocide and forced displacement when Christopher Columbus first invaded the Americas in 1492. Or millions of Vietnamese and Korean people who lost their lives from bloody wars of invasion by French and Japanese colonialism, respectively, followed by U.S. imperialist wars. 

Another form of ethnic cleansing, aka mass gentrification, took place a mere 20 years ago inside the U.S. when on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina went from a category one to a category five storm in just one day, producing catastrophic winds and floods for the people of New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast. 

The New Orleans population faced a horrific reality when no mass evacuation or temporary shelter plans were organized by the city administration, especially for those who had no cars. Trapped inside the New Orleans Superdome, thousands of houseless people lacked sanitation, clean water and food. So-called “looters” were shot on sight by the police occupation or racist white vigilantes for expropriating food, diapers and other basic necessities needed to survive. 

Even today, tens of thousands of mainly Black New Orleans residents have not been allowed to return to their homes. Privatization of schools and hospitals in New Orleans was a major incentive for this mass gentrification.

The following excerpted article, written by Workers World Managing Editor Monica Moorehead, entitled “Katrina survivors deserve reparations,” was posted on workers.org on Oct. 13, 2005. This article can also be found in the “Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle” book. Go to tinyurl.com/24ueavhn to read the entire article.

The winds and flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina did more than physically destroy countless lives and homes throughout the Delta region, including in Biloxi, Mississippi., Mobile, Alabama. and especially New Orleans. Millions of people here and worldwide were deeply horrified to see the insensitive manner in which the [George W.] Bush administration as well as local and state officials left tens of thousands of poor people, the vast majority of them Black, to suffer and die needlessly during and after Katrina hit, especially in New Orleans.

No other single event in recent U.S. history has more forcefully unmasked the heinous reality that national oppression, a devastating combination of white supremacy and poverty that impacts people of color disproportionately, does exist inside the wealthiest, most powerful, imperialist country in the world. This is what really lies beneath the collective negligence of those in power.

The Katrina crisis helped to expose for so many just who are the haves and have-nots in society. Katrina showed that the have-nots are not just individuals in the ones or twos, or even in the hundreds or thousands, but in the millions. Not only are the have-nots the poor — officially 37 million people who live in poverty and extreme poverty — but many are African American, Latine, Arab, Asian and Indigenous, out of proportion to their numbers in the overall population.

And sitting on top of the have-nots are those who own and control everything in society, those consumed with capitalist greed — the ruling class. They are the Fortune 500 CEOs — an exclusive club of multimillionaires and billionaires, mostly white, straight males who worship making profits, not serving human needs. And those who occupy the White House, the U.S. military hierarchy and other seats of power are willing servants for the ruling class.

For African Americans, Latine people, Indigenous people and other people of color, enduring racist oppres­sion in its overt and covert forms has become a fact of life for many generations. The videotaped brutal beating of Robert Davis, a 64-year-old African American retired teacher, by racist New Orleans cops is an all too familiar reminder that racism is, as the old saying goes, “as American as apple pie.”

The White House and the profit-hungry corporations they represent have made it clear through their actions that Black people, immigrants and the poor, including whites, will not be welcome back to New Orleans. Thanks to their hostility towards the poor and Black people, they want to use the Katrina tragedy to transform New Orleans into a playground for mainly affluent whites. That cannot be allowed to happen. In fact, many Black activists from around the country, especially in the South, have quickly come together to say no to this racist gentrification plan.

Grassroots redevelopment plan needed

What kind of justice do the survivors deserve? Justice that includes the right of Black Katrina survivors to return to their respective homes and to rebuild their communities in any fashion that they want; the right to a decent and guaranteed income provided by state and federal governments; the right to a living wage, including upholding the prevailing wage laws under the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act; the right to decent housing, not the substandard housing that many of the Katrina survivors had before the hurricane even hit; the right to control reconstruction funds to rebuild their communities, not no-bid Halliburton contracts; the end to martial law, including police terror and the right to decent health care and education.

All these demands and more encompass the fundamental right to self-determination and reparations that have been systematically denied to African Americans since the days of slavery and the overthrow of Reconstruction following the Civil War.

All of these demands would be justified even if it weren’t for the Katrina crisis.