Two rants: my dad and Casey Anthony

A married couple, friends of my parents', are staying with my family at the moment, and they haven't seen me in quite a while. As such, they're interested in what I've been doing at school. Tonight at dinner, my mom's friend K* asked me what my favorite class was at school this past year. I replied that I had really enjoyed my anthropology class and my history class - Race as the History of an Idea.

To which my father replied, "Race isn't an idea. It's a skin color."

Oy.

Having given you that little gem, I'll continue on to my main rant of the night: the case of Casey Anthony. (Information is ganked from Wikipedia, so I'm sorry for any inaccuracies; it's probably just the most cohesive source I'm going to find.)

This woman was recently found not guilty of killing her three-year-old daughter, Caylee, back in 2008. Apparently, Casey took her daughter and disappeared for a month; after that month had passed, Casey's father George and her mother Cindy found a letter on their door that led them to find Casey's car in a tow yard. Cindy called the police and reported Caylee missing. "There is something wrong," she said. "I found my daughter's car today and it smells like there's been a dead body in the damn car." Casey, according to Wikipedia, "acknowledged" that her

daughter was missing - and had been so for a month! 

Yikes. 

It gets hairier. Anthony lied to the police (and was later convicted for this on several charges), alternately claiming that Caylee was with a nanny and that the nanny had kidnapped her, and that she had been at work on the day of the murder. It turns out that she didn't even work at Universal Studios (her alleged place of employment) - not only that, but she hadn't for several years. 

The case ended up dragging on for three years, at least partly because forensic scientists were running tests on Casey's car, and police were running searches on her computer. What they found was eerie: searches had been made on that computer for such terms as "how to make chloroform" and "neck breaking." Chloroform showed up in the forensic tests on her car, as did chemicals usually found during decomposition. When Caylee's bones were eventually found, they were found inside a laundry bag - and her mouth was covered with duct tape.

People have been convicted on less than this - yet Casey Anthony walked free. Why? 

Look at her picture again - I'm fairly sure we all know why. According to the prosecution against Casey, "no one makes an accident look like a murder," said in response to claims that Caylee had simply drowned, and that Casey's parents had tried to cover up the evidence. The smell in the car, the matching of the exact brand of duct tape that Casey used at home to the duct tape covering Caylee's mouth, the chloroform and the Internet search - this may be circumstantial evidence, but it seems pretty damn conclusive to me. Casey's parents don't seem smart enough to be able to fudge the dates of an Internet search on their computer, either. 

"Casey Anthony is a beautiful white woman," said Karyl McBride, a psychologist, and she's right. Unfortunately, in many cases, it seems like that's all our society needs to presume innocence in the face of guilt.