A WEEK has passed since a black man's burden was nailed to the podium. The burdens of white leaders are never nailed down.
The most gracious reactions among presidential rivals to Barack Obama's speech on race came not from Hillary Clinton. She has yet to personally characterize the speech. Asked the day after if Clinton had seen excerpts of it, communications director Howard Wolfson said, "I believe that she did, and I think she thought it was a good speech."
Mike Huckabee, the former GOP candidate, who is an ordained Baptist minister, said enough was enough of the tarring of Obama with the incendiary sermon excerpts of Obama's former minister Jeremiah Wright.
"Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could, and I agree, it's a very historic speech . . ." Huckabee said on MSNBC. "He made the point and I think it's a valid one. That you can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can't. Whether it's me, whether it's Obama, anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements."
Huckabee went much further. "I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack . . . I'm probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you. We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie; you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant and you can't sit out there with everyone else; there's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office; here's where you sit on the bus.
"And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment and you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."
John McCain, the assured Republican nominee resisted the attempt by FOX News's Sean Hannity to whip Wright's remarks into a pyre for Obama. McCain said coolly, "I do know Senator Obama. He does not share those views . . . I've had endorsements of some people that I didn't share their views . . . My life has been one of reconciliation. If people want to put their past behind them, to apologize, to say, 'Look, we made mistakes in the past but we want to move forward,' I respect that and embrace it. Because all of us have made serious mistakes in our lives and I am certainly one of them."
Even in their graciousness, McCain and Huckabee know they have a free pass. They and the Republican Party still associate with hysterical agents of religious intolerance and romantics of the Confederacy. Both competed for the endorsements of evangelicals who call the Roman Catholic Church a cult, blame Hurricane Katrina on homosexuals, and say it is America's role to destroy Islam. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was "happy" for the endorsement of Bob Jones III, the chancellor of Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating until 2000 and still bans "militant" gay alumni from campus.
Clinton has her own free pass. She repeatedly has had to dump surrogates for stereotyping Obama. She once led Obama among black voters, yet has lost almost all of them with her camp's tactics. Yet she faces no pressure to reveal her racial views. And she certainly is offering none in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary, where surrogate and Governor Ed Rendell says, "You've got conservative whites here and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate."
Once again, America's white leaders play footsie with white intolerance while Obama was pressured to bring the nation the head of Jeremiah Wright. Once again, a black person holds the nation's bag of racial burdens. Whatever discussions Obama started across America with his speech, the fact that Huckabee and McCain offer more comfort to Obama than Clinton is evidence that at the top, the conversation is tongue-tied.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
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