Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama speaks about race during a news conference in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008. (Matt Rourke/Associated Press)

Washington, D.C., run by white people but mostly peopled by black people, was talking about race this week.

Everybody watched Senator Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech "A More Perfect Union," and just about everybody thinks it was brilliant. And it was.

Obama crafted a nuanced, intelligent address about things that aren't discussed often in polite company, and delivered it without obvious applause lines or a simplistic message track.

The New York Times called it "Mr. Obama's Profile in Courage." A commentator on the BBC called it perhaps the most important speech on race since Martin Luther King announced he had a dream. Donna Brazile, one of the most prominent black Democrats in the country, was practically gasping on National Public Radio the next morning about its significance.

Most here saw the speech as having tried to move the race debate out of the old victimhood bazaar, where its tacticians and strategists have spent so many years throwing the same grievances back and forth, vying for public support by constantly seeking to expose the venality and hypocrisy of the other side.

Obama acknowledged that good Americans, black and white, can harbour mean views about other races, and that the resentment behind those views is understandable, sometimes even legitimate.

But, he said, it's time to just recognize the other guy might have a point, and move on, and try to get some work done that will benefit everybody. Like building decent schools, and providing some decent health care, and preserving some decent jobs.

A supremely practical idea, the more so because Obama seems to understand what the well-intentioned social engineers of the '60s, '70s and '80s did not: That the various tribes in this country don't really want to integrate.

Forcible refinement

It has been 54 years since Brown vs. Board of Education pried open the doors of all-white schools here, and 44 years since the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in public places.

The activists who forced those changes were determined to crack, and then shatter, the self-serving credo of "separate but equal." They saw it, correctly, as an oxymoron, a euphemism created by white America to keep blacks in their place.

But the civil rights movement didn't stop there. It went on to attack the attitudes behind discriminatory laws, reasoning that oppression would end only when Americans of different colours were pushed together — against their will if necessary — and forced to take stock of and appreciate one another.

Beginning in the 1970s, courts began ruling that even racially imbalanced schools hurt the rights of minority students, and ordered busing, the obligatory transfer of pupils between school zones in order to achieve a satisfactory racial makeup in schools.

At about the same time, governments began implementing affirmative action programs, which amounted to a form of reverse discrimination, in order to force a satisfactory racial makeup in the workplace.

The people who worked for these changes were, for the most part, Americans of good will, largely from the political left. They were coalitions of blacks, whites, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Hispanics, native people and gays who came together in a march to equality.

They were out to teach other Americans tolerance and brotherhood. And they did make this country a better place.

Opposites repel, likes attract

"A way of life has evolved in which race is not so tense," says Todd Gitlin, a leftist professor at Columbia University who has written about race for years. "The discussion is a lot less tense. The atmosphere is so much less bristling."

That, perhaps, is because having achieved some measure of détente, the tribes of this country have largely halted the discussion, at least with one another.

Students, thrown together by policies and laws, have retreated into their own racial cohorts. In playgrounds and auditoriums and cafeterias, they arrange themselves by race, huddling together as their teachers and governments strive for ever more diversity. They might be respectful, but they keep their distance.

My daughter, who attends an international school here, began complaining about it this year. When she was in primary school, she said, her playgroup was mixed and carefree. Now, as a teenager, she understands that invisible lines have formed. She still smiles and waves at black classmates, but from another table across the room.

In universities, there are separate clubs and dormitories, even on occasion separate graduation rituals for blacks, Jews, Muslims, Asians, native people and Hispanics. And even within those groups, there is splintering. The old gay-and-lesbian alliances, for example, are breaking into subgroups, which tend to keep their distance from one another.

There are even people who advocate legal re-segregation as a form of self-help, arguing that minority students are better off learning amongst themselves.

It almost makes you wonder whether someone's going to suggest a return to separate drinking fountains.

Voluntary separation

And this isn't just happening in schools.

In the northwest corridor of Washington, D.C., and southern Maryland, in some of the most liberal, progressive neighbourhoods in the nation, you have to look patiently for a black face. Similarly, real estate agents explain, an absence of white residents is a selling point for affluent black customers looking to buy in certain upscale neighborhoods of the northeast.

On "U" Street, just north of downtown D.C., near two major universities, the nightclubs west of 14th Street are generally black, the clubs east of 14th generally white. The patrons, mainly students, would be horrified at any suggestion of racism, but a cursory look would seem to suggest just that.

And churches in this most-heavily-churched nation are usually monochromatic — even those most dedicated to social justice.

Obama referred to that in his Philadelphia speech, observing that "the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning."

Gitlin regrets that state of affairs. He suggests that in the United States, "the pot is still melting. There are clumps that don't melt, that refuse to melt."

He was thrilled by Obama's speech, but as a race warrior who's been around a lot longer than the senator from Illinois, he's enthusiastically skeptical: "I don't know," says Gitlin. "I suspend disbelief. That speech was flying on two wings and a lot of prayers. It is a very American hope on his part that you can face it and transcend it."

Table stakes

It's hard to know exactly what Obama thinks a reasonable racial rapprochement in this country would entail; he describes himself as a realist, and leaves it at that.

It may be, of course, that Obama himself is the answer: a biracial man, clearly the face of what's to come in the big American cities, where mixed marriages are more and more common. It will be much harder to draw invisible lines in a cappuccino-coloured nation, if and when it arrives.

But when politicians, including Barack Obama, get up and invoke Martin Luther King's great oration, the one in which he longs for a country where "one day … the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," you can't help but reflect that that day in fact arrived some time ago.

People can sit together at that table now. They just don't want to.

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