If you are a lawyer for the ACLU, it's easy to say skin color is irrelevant in a speech in a nice safe courtroom. But if you are a cop on a dark street you had damned well better know the difference. This is terribly unfair to most black people who are not lawbreakers. But it is also not the fault of the police. On the issue of returning Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba, both liberals and conservatives have been making comparisons that are not applicable.
Leftists point to examples where the United States has returned children to Syria, for example.
They say Cuba is the same thing. But mostly, of course, liberals are playing the race card. They are saying returning immigrants to Jamaica or Haiti is the same as this case in Cuba. Conservatives who are against returning him to Cuba talk about children in dictatorships and oppressive regimes in general. To my surprise, one conservative actually had the guts to ask a black congresswoman who was demanding the boy be returned whether she would ask the same thing if the child had been a black refugee from South Africa in the days of apartheid.