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.
Kenny
Bat One
Anna
DINO
Sandy
realitybasedbob
Neiman
Jackass Jimmy
robert108
