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Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

> My overwhelming suspicion -- as someone who went to an Ivy League school -- is that I was being treated as "yet another brown person,"

Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? It's an old concept: In the eyes of the law, people don't get special treatment depending on their social status.

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My point in including that piece of knowledge, is that I know what it's like when people have all sorts of different ideas about your socioeconomic background. I've been an Ivy brat. I've also been a homeless person. At the time of the events described, I am a well paid societal-normative upper middle class software engineer. I have first hand experience of when people are addressing me as a person of privilege, just another person, or an inferior scumbag. There is a tendency when I'm in the world of the justice/police system, for privileged people to automatically talk to me more like I'm a scumbag than I'm a normative person, but then I'll see the same someone take a different attitude when talking to someone privileged and "white."

So no, I'm not expressing disappointment that I'm not spoken to as a privileged person. I'm just wishing I was spoken to equally as a person.

I think the point is that people also shouldn't get special treatment because of their race, and should be treated courteously regardless of who they are. Poorly phrased on the part of the OP, but one of HN's norms is to apply the Principle of Charity and consider the best interpretation of a comment rather than the worst.

Unfortunately the law is implemented by regular ol' people who are given quite a bit of discretion.

Did you miss the part where they were treated worse because of their skin color?

Yes, because that part wasn't there, just the parent's unsubstantiated suspicion that racism was the likeliest explanation for an unpleasant experience in dealing with low-level government bureaucrats.

Be more careful in your reading. There is a certain way that people talk to someone they view as considerably inferior. The fact that people working in a place so quickly shift into that mode, even when it's at odds with the facts of the particular situation, is a very strong indicator that some sort of prejudice is at play. Whether or not it's racism, it's certainly not compatible with good governance.

> Yes, because that part wasn't there

Neither was the part where they expected "special treatment depending on their social status." You don't get to dismiss the author's suspicions as imaginary while elevating your own to fact.

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