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Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

Please don't do a dismissive handwave over what's really an important element to this story. That the victim is a person of color is absolutely relevant to this story; it demonstrates a bias on behalf of the DEA agent, or perhaps simply a cynicism: they know what they can get away with in the eyes of the public.

Of COURSE race is an important element of how law enforcement interacts with citizens. Race is part of these issues. The very term "race card" is offensive and marginalizing, even if you didn't mean it that way.

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i don't think i was marginalizing it. if anyone, it was parent and article writer tried to make it look like assets forfeiture affects only some groups of people. It does not. And making it look like it is makes it only harder to fight against. As soon as you try to divide public into groups - you get less power to fight.

I am foreigner, so I can see it from different perspective than regular american person, who grew up with the notion "we, whites, are oppressing black men, and we should feel guilty". As soon as you guys realize that whites/blacks/asians/whatever word you come up with for arbitrary characteristic of a group of people, who live same life, live in the same country, has on a daily basis more or less similar issues, and, in case of assets forfeiture, all likely to get abused with it, may be then you understand that you need fight back, and not try to differentiate yourself from your neighbor.

Just a random overview from a guy without blurred picture of what is going on in your country.

> a person of color

There's one of your problems. Am I a person of no colour?

Your (and this isn't a direct attack on you) use of language contributes to the situation while it is trying to be softly softly.

We should not define people in terms of what they are "not" or lump them into a group of who they are different from ("minority"). So no, if you are white you can be just that.

Maybe it doesn't have as much play outside the U.S. but the term PoC seems to work well here. For the whole semantic argument I'll point to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color .

we're even more positive, blacks are called black. No messing about.

We also have IC codes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_codes

    Code 	Ethnicity 
    IC1 	White - North European
    IC2 	White - South European
    IC3 	Black
    IC4 	Asian (in the UK Asian refers to people from the Indian subcontinent like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,  Nepal)
    IC5 	Chinese, Japanese, or other South East Asian
    IC6 	Arabic or North African
    IC9 	Unknown

And, just to polish things off, the European Union has declared that there is no such thing as "race".

Of course it is very likely race was a factor here, but it may well have been that he was the only poor soul who they could find with an envelope of cash.

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