To be honest, some of these comments make me sad. Yeah, it probably is a low chance of survival but Black people aren't going to break out of our current condition by cautious incrementalism, we need to be bolder. While Musk is often a showman, I give him props for at least pushing the issue and keeping it alive as NASA continues to delay their Mars mission (it should have happened by now).
That being said, I am not shocked there are few Blacks. First, we don't know who applied and I don't feel a lot of us would have given these comments so we caused our own selection bias. Second, I doubt Musk cares about any diversity or what not. His best bud from Paypal, Peter Thiel, wrote the book
The Diversity Myth slashing at the concept. It is rumored he first got into conservative politics as a result of Blacks and other minorities doing some kind of march at Stanford while he was a student. Musk also apparently dismissed concerns of discrimination by Black workers at Tesla so we shouldn't look for him to get us to Mars in big numbers:
Musk said people who faced discrimination should be more thick skinned and accept apologies
I think a hidden goal of this is to create some ultra-libertarian experimental colony. Thiel is trying to do this on ships on Earth right now. In this place it would be survival of the fittest and civil rights would be an infringement on "freedom".