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One way to rock the Expert Barber Shop in Washington, D.C., is to ask if the possible election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president on Tuesday might bring an end to racial discrimination. That really gets the gents going down at the Expert. As soon as they throw their heads back, they start laughing, h unh-hunhs and hehs and bahs, an entire symphony of profundo chortle. Hilarious! Then the one-liners start rolling around the room, call-and-response style. “You have a black person trying to get a mortgage, and then a white person?” This is from Raymond Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins is tall, 54, looks like Clark Gable if Clark Gable had been black. He's the kickoff man.

“Or you go into one of them high-end stores?” he says. “They give a black man better service there. They'll follow him everywhere. They'll show him everything – and eventually they'll show him the door.”

“Black president, and a black man still can't get a cab at 10 at night.”

“What time? Ten? You be hard to get one at noon.”

Don't misunderstand: Mr. Hawkins and his fellow clients are all for Mr. Obama. They want to see him elected. But they're even keener to see if he will be. “It'll be interesting,” a barber named Bruce says, “to see if a white man will go to battle for a black man.”

This isn't white, tourist Washington, the northwest quadrant where you see the White House and the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial and the other gleaming symbols of national grandeur stacked up on permanent parade. This is southeast D.C., where people are born and live and die without leaving the neighbourhood, where the whites who make up roughly a third of the population of the nation's capital do not live. The best time to visit is in the fall – the turning leaves make the buildings look less dingy.

Whatever else the election of Barack Obama might produce – a left-leaning America, a refreshed democratic process, another chance to cure a choking economy, a warmer reception for America overseas – one conclusion is certain. The United States, a country that 150 years ago was sundered by a civil war fought over slavery and has been strangled by segregation and racism ever since, will have elected a black man as its leader.

The question is: Does that actually matter? And if so, why?

Mr. Hawkins, coiffed and snipped to perfection, is almost out the door. He looks good for an October Friday: long dress shorts, green tennis sweater – a classic look. “You just have more in common with your own,” he says. “That's just the way it is. I don't believe that, as a people, we're against any race. We're just pro our own.”

He checks his hair in the mirror a last time. “What I hope he does change is our own misconception of each other. We've been conditioned to think of ourselves as inferior. It's hard to change. A lot of things will not. But maybe he could change that. Maybe this hatred will change to pride.”

The gaps

Washington was empty for the last two weeks of the campaign. The streets yawned. There wasn't much of a rush hour. You could even find a parking spot, normally as rare here as firm principles. The only thing people wanted to talk about was Mr. Obama. It was like tapping an artery. People spouted for 10 minutes without stopping.

They couldn't help asking hypothetical questions. Some of them were: What will it be like the first time Mr. Obama walks out to Hail to the Chief? Where will the first Barack Obama Elementary School be named? Will he get a statue on the mall even if he loses? A monument if he wins? What's the best way to commemorate the election – laminate the newspaper? Hang it on the wall?

“Those are going to be incredible collector's items,” said Carla Cohen, the 72-year-old white owner of Politics and Prose, Washington's oldest independent bookstore. She recommended the audiobook CD of Dreams From My Father, Mr. Obama's first memoir, because the candidate narrated it himself. Then she said, “Imagine what this means. It has opened up the world for people. They're going to be different. Full of possibilities that have never existed before.” She was only the first person to express the sentiment.

These were liberal conversations. Sometimes the people claimed to be moral conservatives as well, a self-description more and more black Americans agree with. Theresa Price, an African-American mother of three boys and a stepson, had started a group called Mocha Moms, dedicated to re-establishing the moral role of African-American women in family and community life.

She had a full grasp of reality: Eighty per cent of white children are proficient at math. The number for black children is 37 per cent. This is the famous “achievement gap.”

“In any other race,” Ms. Price said, “that would be a huge scandal. I think it's very significant that Obama's made history in so many ways. Just to have the image of a strong black man – a strong black African-American man – and his wife and children on the international stage, it's so powerful.”

Sometimes, rarely (Washington's a liberal town), people had doubts. An African-American banker named Brad Wood said he refused to vote for the Democrats because he disagreed with their fiscal policy, although he knew a President Obama would give his teenage son something to aspire to.

In front of the White House, in the permanent knot of tourists who gaze at the executive mansion from the bottom of the lawn, I met two white women from Texarkana, a town that is split by the Texas-Arkansas boundary.

Beth Hague, the Texas one, had short hair and was voting for John McCain because “I just don't trust Obama.”

Her friend, Pam New, was blond and had always voted Democrat, though her husband was taking an anti-Obama stand. She seemed to be taking it personally. “I probably still will vote Democrat,” she said. “Though we know a lot of people who won't vote for him because of his race.”

“We're from the south,” Beth said.

They were nice women. Later, they sent me a picture of themselves in fresh makeup, standing in front of the Washington Monument.

I heard about expatriates who were coming back to vote. Rose-Anne Clermont, a 37-year-old Haitian American, was flying home from Berlin so she could physically cast her ballot in America. “I'm not getting any work done anyway,” she said on the telephone. Instead, she was spending three hours a day dissecting the campaign and fretting.

“It's not just that Barack Obama is the first African-American president. Do you know Chris Rock, the comedian? It's like he says: It would be different if it was Flavor Flav” – the hip-hop TV goofball. “But there has also been eight years of the worst possible administration. And it could all be replaced with such a remarkable person. I need to be with Americans, in America.”

What she admired most of all about Mr. Obama was that he was “also a magnificent intellectual. To be black and a Harvard intellectual – I'm like, you go with your Harvard-educated self!” Ms. Clermont went to Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.

Not the usual voter rhetoric, in other words. Not the usual candidate. The campaign issues have been graver, but not different. What is different is his race.Shifting sands

In the fall of 2007, the U.S. Pew Research Center conducted a massive survey of the attitudes of black and white Americans. The results were surprising.

In 1986, 57 per cent of blacks thought that their lives would improve in the future. By the fall of 2007, only 44 per cent thought so.

The changes the researchers uncovered within black America were even more shocking. Blacks and whites each believe their values have grown more similar in the past 10 years. But the number of African Americans who believe that middle-class black values have diverged from poor black values is twice as many as those who think they are still the same. The more educated a black person is, the more he or she believes this. Nearly 40 per cent of blacks feel that black Americans should no longer think of themselves as a single race.

This is huge. Three centuries of racial solidarity, bonded by oppression, is evaporating. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has trouble recruiting young black Americans these days.

Yet this racial collapse has helped Mr. Obama's candidacy. A late February endorsement by John Lewis, a strongman of the Congressional Black Caucus who had previously supported Hillary Clinton, made that clear.

Mr. Lewis is a living hero of the civil-rights movement. In 1961, the year Mr. Obama was born, he was beaten by a white mob in Montgomery, Ala. Two years later, he was in Selma, fighting for voting rights for 15,000 blacks, fewer than 1 per cent of whom were registered. (The Ku Klux Klan was making them take a literacy test to qualify.)

Nowadays, Mr. Lewis has become a lead power broker in the African-American voting block in Congress. He serves the needs of the black population. If you want their support, he's been the man you have to please. (A black Republican congressman once referred to the Democratic Congressional Black Caucus as “race-hustling poverty pimps.”)

“The Congressional Black Caucus felt very strongly that you don't vote for someone just because they're black,” said Lynette Clemetson, managing editor of The Root, The Washington Post's new black-directed website in the Afrosphere. “He had to be able to win.”

He did. By June, Mr. Obama had defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Ms. Clemetson's website celebrated the anointment of “a presidential standard-bearer who is not only black but actually dances like one” with the headline “Obama Wins, Pigs Fly.”

The delicacy of the civil-rights establishment's embrace of Mr. Obama is not lost on anyone. “Obama doesn't come from the civil-rights movement,” observed a former White House insider, a colleague of John Podesta, Bill Clinton's ex-chief of staff, who seems to be organizing Mr. Obama's transition team. (Washington is lousy with former Clinton staffers these days.)

“It's certainly not a conscious repudiation of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and John Lewis. It's a generational response. Lewis and Jackson represent the boomer generation's approach to race. Obama is a repudiation of the boomers. That's what the problem with Hillary was. Obama came along, he said, ‘Can we get beyond the boomers?' ”

In the 2000 Al Gore campaign, for instance, his campaign manager Donna Brazile made it one of her jobs to speak to senior black leader Jesse Jackson daily, just to keep him happy. “Those old guys,” the insider saud, “they exercised their power as a power block. Whereas Obama is moving to a wider circle. That meant moving beyond being a ‘race' candidate.”

Will that make Mr. Obama more independent? “Clinton loved to be loved,” the insider said. “And he cashed a lot of coupons to get elected. With Obama, he doesn't have one set group of supporters. And it's going to be very difficult for people to call in favours to manipulate him.” Not that Washington's political establishment won't try. “In the first 100 days, Congress will try to lead him, rather than let him lead them.”

But dropping racial struggle from the foundation of one's self-definition isn't so easy. Lonnie Bunch, the founding curator of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, finds that “personally, what you lose is some of your mooring. Because gradually you've learned to deal with race in America; You've learned to deal with people who question the colour of your skin. Then you lose your rock, and you have to say, ‘What is my rock now?' So it's cultural leap, but it's also a challenge.”

Mr. Obama has set others free too. On. Ms. Clemetson's desk was a handwritten letter from a 69-year-old white woman from East Hampton. Conn. When the woman was 9, she was forbidden from playing with a black friend named Betty on the grounds that “her colour would rub off on me.” Later, she dated a young black man named Billy Knight, whom she took home only to have her father ban him from the house. Fifty years later, she wrote: “I am voting for Barack Obama.”

“She's a 69-year-old woman who has gone from being afraid that her hand will turn brown if she touches a black person to voting for Barack Obama,” Ms. Clemetson said, turning the letter over in her hand. “This is a big leap for the American voting population. And if you came up in a time when someone told you you couldn't even touch a black person, it's a leap over a huge social chasm. And there may be people who vote for Barack Obama who still might find it hard that their child is dating a black person, or have a black person as head of a company.” Pause. “It's just too easy to call her a racist.”

Mr. Obama didn't eliminate the race factor; he simply made it less political, and therefore more complex, more open and more human.

Bamalot

What will happen if he wins? Willee Lewis, a white Washington socialite and a long-standing Democrat, said the usual election-watch parties were ready to go, but because the campaign has been so fiercely fought, “I think the situation is pretty intense. A friend said, ‘I think we won't have Democrats and Republicans to the same festivity this time.' ” Of course, if you're really high status in D.C., you don't attend election-watch parties at all; you're on television.

Ms. Lewis has the kind of non-stop charm and unflagging conversational energy that must come in handy when trying to extract charitable donations from 400 fathoms of human shale, which is what she does a lot. If Mr. Obama won, she said, D.C. would change. She'd already been preparing: A Washington socialite's address book is her kingdom, and nearly 40 per cent of Ms. Lewis's was already filled with the names of black people.

As her friend Conrad Cafritz, a noted real-estate speculator and Democratic supporter, said, “The Democrats like the city and live in it. Whereas the Republicans work here, and live in Virginia, where the taxes are lower.”

When Mr. Obama brings in his crowd, as every president does, the result will be a more vibrant Washington. “The parties will be fabulous,” another socialite beamed. People are already referring to ‘Bamalot' and invoking the Kennedy years.

“Obama has the prospect of a Kennedy-style reign,” Mr. Caffritz said. “Maybe sans the style, but with all the energy and all the intelligence. A new crowd of people who may change the complexion of the city.”

Spoken like a true Washingtonian.

What will happen if Mr. Obama loses? No liberal in Washington wants to think about that. The latest joke within the Beltway is that everybody will move to Canada: The underground railroad will become the northern express.

“It's nerve-racking,” said Terence Samuel, a long-time Senate reporter who now works as deputy managing editor for The Root. A loss would be “shocking, and dispiriting, and reopens the question of race. Because the question of race is a very depressing question.

“This has been an issue for a long time. We've been thinking about it – Americans have been thinking about it – for a long time. I mean race and I mean hundreds of years. And there's this little bit of absolution in the possibility of his winning: People just think, he's gonna run the world, and we're gonna show you how. The argument that there are limits to what a black person can do because he's black becomes much less effective.”

On the other hand, he noted, remembering of the Florida fiasco, anything is possible. “It is an American election.”

At the Lincoln Memorial

Sometimes I got up early and walked from my hotel behind the Capitol, where Congress sits so high and round and dainty, to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end of the Washington Mall, America's presentation Main Street. The first time I did it, I noticed how small the White House seems from the Mall – almost modest, like a groundskeeper's cottage.

From the Lincoln Memorial, you could look back at the Capitol in the bright autumn morning light – the calm, planned ideal of democracy. Like J.M.W. Turner's great classical pastoral, The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius, from the early 1800s. All it needed was a couple of sheep grazing.

I liked talking to people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In the course of one morning, I met 10 white Americans from across the country. Eight were voting for Mr. McCain, always because of abortion.

Lawrence Sciscenti and his sister, Mary Jo, had grown up in D.C., but now they lived in Florida. They hated Mr. Obama. They accused him of stealing the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton by not holding a convention roll call, of being a “nitwit” and “too young.” They seemed furious and also pleased to be furious, as if it gave them purpose. Then Mr. Sciscenti said, quite loudly, “He's a conniving Chicago thug lawyer,” and I started wishing I was somewhere else.

It got uglier. Mr. Sciscenti was voting for Mr. McCain for one reason: “He's a genuine war hero.” Mr. Obama, on the other hand, was an “abortionist,” had connections to Raila Amollo Odinga, the Kenyan despot, to Tony Rezko, the convicted political donor. By the time he started calling him “Herr Obama” in a loud voice, I thought I'd heard enough.

It's a yeasty civilization, the United States. People take their politics seriously, but they also use it as therapy and entertainment, and sometimes they don't make a distinction. “Why are you even here?” I finally asked Mr. Sciscenti, and he said: “We're here to pay our respects to the greatest president of the United States. Because there were no United States before Lincoln.”

I think he'd missed the point. What I most liked to do was to climb the Lincoln Memorial and read Lincoln's words etched in the marble of its interior walls – the Gettysburg Address on the north wall, the two-minute dedication that commemorated the decisive victory in the Civil War, in which Lincoln declared the nation's new purpose, away from states' rights and toward a bigger goal: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom ... and that government of the people ... by the people ... for the people ... shall not perish from the earth.”

And then on the north wall, even better, his Second Inaugural Address from 1865, in which he lamented the duration and ambitions of the war on both sides, chastened as he was by the carnage. They didn't call him Honest Abe for nothing. Like Mr. Obama in his speech on race delivered in Philadelphia last March, in which he tried to find common ground between the economic struggles of whites and blacks, Lincoln blamed neither side. He only committed the nation once again to the endless struggle for emancipation. Even if the war had to continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

The struggle for racial equality has produced some of the best sentences ever written. Stories about who we are and who we are not allowed to be tend to do that. Mr. Obama is a first-rate writer. His memoirs – Dreams From My Father, which he published in 1995, and the more recent The Audacity of Hope – are the bestselling books of all time at Carla Cohen's Politics and Print store. People read them to be moved.

“I don't know anyone who is not working on the campaign,” Ms. Cohen told me one afternoon. “It's never been like this. If Robert Kennedy had lived, it would have been like this. But he didn't live.”

No one likes to talk about whether Mr. Obama will live. Lincoln was back in office barely a month after his second inauguration when he was assassinated. The idea for what eventually became the Lincoln Memorial was first raised a year later.

On those steps in 1963, on a spot now marked by his engraved name, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood and delivered his most famous writing: I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. …

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. Four years later, standing on the balcony of Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., he was shot through the head. It was April 4. Jesse Jackson was there. Afterward, in Washington and many other cities, riots of fury broke out.

Raymond Hawkins, the natty man in the barber shop, was one of the looters at 14th Street and U Street in northwest Washington that day, having been let out of school at noon. He wasn't ashamed of it. He had heard Dr. King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial too. He remembered exactly where he sat: by the end of the Reflecting Pool, on the left side of the stairs.

Everybody I met in Washington who had been at that march could remember every detail of the day. They were all connected that way. Some of them may be running the next administration.

This is what Mr. Obama has done with race in the campaign since the beginning, and why so many commentators say race hasn't been a campaign issue. He hasn't had to talk about race because it is there for everyone to silently contemplate every time he appears on the TV or in the street or at a rally. Carla Cohen said Mr. Obama “is over race” and that she doesn't even “see colour when I hear him,” but she remembers where she was in the King rally, and has led a life united by the thread of her commitment to that cause: She is not over race, and why would she want to be?.

Mr. Obama has been generous enough – maybe because from the age of 5 to the end of high school he lived away from the tumult of mainland America, in Hawaii and Indonesia – not to claim the racial struggle for one group, but to allow others into it. You hear his calm words and his sharp, careful, articulate mind as he campaigns, but because he is not afraid to be who he is, skin and all, you can also contemplate the great tradition to which he belongs, and to which you then belong by letting him engage you.

Mr. Obama is gracious enough to exclude no one: The struggles of the oppressed black man and the poor white man and the uninsured Asian mother are a common human struggle – not just the racial one, but the one of flesh and tears and broken hearts and the love of children.

Content of their character

High-school students burst out of Wilson Senior High School in northwest D.C. at the end of the day like a cloud of steam. But I notice one young black woman sitting quietly, waiting for her bus.

Her name is Tempestt Newton. She is 17, a senior. She wants to study chemistry at Columbia, and she has excellent marks. “I'm confident I'll get in,” she says, not smugly. If she were old enough to vote, she says, “I would vote for Biden-Obama. I believe the Democratic Party has two very strong candidates. But it's more about what he brings.”

She wants to be involved in something bigger than herself – she is running for student vice-president – but she also thinks she and her classmates are searching for something they can't always identify. “The people of my generation who do want change, it's hard for us to take a stand. We don't have as many profound leaders as you guys did in the sixties.”

For her, Mr. Obama isn't “The One;” he isn't “That One,” as Mr. McCain called him during one debate; he is just one of what she hopes will be many.

She has braids, and a beret, and big loopy earrings, Coach sunglasses, a full rack of braces, and what looks like something plastic in her tongue. (I'm afraid to ask.) “Today is International Day,” she says. “I tried to go for a Parisian look.”

She seems like a remarkable girl, and she makes my chest ache a bit: She reminds me of my own daughter. “I think if there is any prejudice,” she says, “it's not about race. It's about – they judge you on the content of your clothes.” I nod.

She wants Mr. Obama to win and will be disappointed if he doesn't, but in that case, she says, “I'll just hope McCain and Palin do what they say they will.” Another pause. “Trying to keep the hobo eye.”

“The hobo eye?” I ask. “That must be a new expression. What does that mean, trying to keep the hobo eye?”

“No, no,” she says, and she's laughing hard by now. “I said, “Trying to keep the hope alive.' ”

Her bus is coming. “When I watch the election campaign,” she says as she shakes my hand goodbye, “I don't see it as a racial thing. I see it as a thing of character. Barack has character. It really is inspiring.”

What Dr. King had hoped for his children, then, 45 years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: To be judged by the content of their character.

What's the recipe for that? A black father, a white mother, a little Hawaii, a dash of Kenya – the countless racial ingredients poured from the past into any of us. Mix as desired, handling gently.

“Our fate is to become one, and yet many,” black writer Ralph Ellison wrote in his 1952 classic Invisible Man. “This is not prophecy, but description.”

Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail