NBC Executive: Obama’s Skin Color Gives Him Legitimacy

On a panel on future Senate candidate Chris Matthews’ show NBC Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief Mark Witaker said Obama’s skin color gives him a lot of legitimacy around the world.

I think it goes beyond the Middle East, and I think it’s a bigger phenomenon which is the leader of the biggest democracy in the world is now a person of color and that is going to give him what political scientists would call a legitimacy in the street around the world that I don’t think an American leader has had, ever perhaps.

Now, Whitaker is probably right to some degree. There are undoubtedly people in the world who trust a black man more than a white man. Just as there may be people who would trust a woman more than a man, or someone of Asian descent more than a black man. And on and on.
The question is: Why is that a good thing? Why should we be saying “Gee, it’s a good thing we elected a black guy so we can gain legitimacy with people who care about skin color”? I thought skin color wasn’t supposed to matter, and that those who think it does matter were bigots who shouldn’t be pandered to.
That’s how I think it should be anyway. If some news executive was saying positive things about how electing a white man to the White House gave the President legitimacy among neo-Nazis in Germany we’d be repulsed. But if things are the other way around it seems to be acceptable.
But it shouldn’t be.