The race card

From dKosopedia

The race card is a conceptual metaphor which portrays politics as a card game, in which the term:race and concepts it evokes are "played", as in "playing the race card", or "holding the race card" to play at a later time.

The threat or belief that race will be raised at a key time is very powerful. It was reputed to have had some effect on outcomes of the following events:

• criminal trial of Michael Jackson
• criminal trial of O.J. Simpson
• Condoleeza Rice succeeding Colin Powell to head the U.S. State Department

Admittedly, global diplomacy and criminal trials are adversarial processes that are very much like games in that they have rules and timing counts for much. But they are also both situations where human rights are supposed to count, and those are supposed to be equal for all persons regardless of "race":

If the person appointed or convicted cannot be trusted by all communities of all races that are affected by their actions, then, they should probably have been passed over, or imprisoned. It solves nothing to lower standards for one group of people, since it simply verifies prejudices of others and creates complaints about unequal treatment. Accordingly the race card should remain in the deck unless it is clearly, without question, the only play left in that deck. In which case, the case is very weak.