There's nothing quite like race to inflame emotions and generate heated comment (except, perhaps, for that other "r" word, religion), as I'm reminded every time I write on the subject.

My column on Hone Harawira's incendiary email a couple of weeks ago brought a record number of emails - and although the vast majority of them were positive, they showed how little insight many of us have into our own prejudices and in-built biases.

"Examine yourself, Tapu," wrote one, who accused me of coming across as "more bigoted". (I did; I feel fine, thanks.) "We live on different planets," wrote another. (Yes, most definitely.)

Someone once wrote that the greatest advantage of being part of a majority group is the invisibility that comes with being considered "normal". You are, whatever your faults, the way the world is supposed to be. No one expects you to be an ambassador for "your" people, or accuses you of being a disgrace to them when you fire off an ill-considered email in the middle of the night. You're free to be yourself, a flawed human being like the rest of us. Members of visible minority groups can only yearn for that kind of freedom.

They suffer a different kind of invisibility, their normalness obscured behind the "otherness" of being different. They stick out for all the wrong reasons, their failures magnified, their successes seen as an exception to the rule.

I don't have room here to go into the intricacies of race relations. Or to discuss why Treaty settlements are a matter of justice, or why we as a nation should want to behave better than a horde of raping, pillaging Vikings, or the fact that Treaty wrongs weren't committed all that long ago, or the entirely reasonable proposition that a people deprived of their economic base by colonisation should suffer inter-generational damage, even if many of them manage to "get over it" and move on.

But it's clear to me from the emails I get that there's a groundswell of goodwill in need of good information and leadership.

It isn't easy to talk about race, nor to break free from it - even for a consummate speechmaker like President Barack Obama, whose determination to transcend racial politics has come up against the realities of 21st-century America. Talk about it, don't talk about it - Obama can't seem to win.

But he at least knows that race is a minefield to be treated with caution. Labour leader Phil Goff seems less wary of the dangers.

It can't be easy to be trailing, apparently unloved and unnoticed, in the wake of a popular Prime Minister, who's enjoying an unusually long honeymoon with the voting public.