True Stories: America's capital of apartheid: North-west usually means white, affluent, educated; north-east, black and poor

THE other day I was buying food at a supermarket on the Holloway Road in London. The cashier was a middle-aged black woman, and I found myself unprepared for our brief encounter: as she gave me my change, she smiled and called me 'dear'.

I realised, to my shock, that after living five years in a US city I had subconsciously braced myself for an unfriendly little transaction. Because the woman was black and I was white, I had expected her to scowl at me; I would probably have unsmilingly taken the change and walked away.

Wherever I have lived, it seems, there are always subtle indicators that say much about the political and socioeconomic standing of one's fellow city-dwellers. In London, it can be something as apparently trifling as whether you are an 071 or 081 telephone subscriber. In Belfast, an address in the Shankill or Falls Road areas tells anyone there all that they are likely to want to know about you: your religion. In Washington, where I now live, the most important distinction is whether you have the letters 'NE' or 'NW' after your address.

'NW' - North-west - almost certainly means you are white, affluent, middle-class, educated. With some exceptions, 'NE' means you are black, poor and probably live in (or close to) an area where crime, drugs and murder are rampant. And hardly ever, from my experience, do the twain meet. In fact, I believe the mainstream US media is pressing down a very firm lid on what, in reality, is still the explosive issue of race relations in America.

Friends visiting Washington think I am exaggerating when I tell them that, socially, this city reminds me most of Johannesburg during apartheid. Race relations are poor, or non-existent. I live in the smug little NW area, where the only black faces you are likely to see are those of supermarket checkout people, the postmen, Federal Express drivers, security guards or telephone engineers.

It is true that my car has been stolen three times and broken into once and that I have also been the victim of a conman with a sob story, but that has been my only direct experience of crime. Yet just three or four miles away, people are being murdered at a far higher rate than in Belfast; in NW you would never know it, though, unless you carefully monitored the news.

'They,' usually both victims and perpetrators of the new urban mayhem, are black; 'we', in our privileged enclaves patrolled by privately employed guards who themselves are from NE, are white.

That there should be anger in NE (or SE, for that matter) over the apartheid-like, expensive lifestyle of those in NW, therefore, should come as no surprise. It helps to explain to a bewildered world why, on 8 November, the nation's capital is likely to vote back into the mayor's office a man whose name has become a by-word for black drug-use, corruption and even jail-time: 58-year-old Marion Barry.

In a city nearly two-thirds black, the voting majority will be delivering a mighty V-sign to the whites of NW. And I cannot blame them: I suspect that if I were black and living in NE, I would be voting for Barry, too.

All the signs are that in a city that is all about power, Washington blacks on election day will have a rare opportunity to exercise theirs, thus controlling the outcome of a US election already being reported around the world.

Which is why, less than five years after FBI agents covertly filmed him in a hotel room smoking crack, Mr Barry will soon re-enter the mayor's office he occupied for 12 inglorious years before 1990. NW will collectively, but privately, splutter with fury around its dinner tables.

The primary elections last month and more recent opinion polls, alas, bear out what I am saying. In the primaries, 70 per cent of blacks voted for Barry compared to just 5 per cent of whites. Polls now show that 80 per cent of Washington blacks believe it will be 'a good thing' if Barry again becomes mayor; an even higher proportion of whites, 82 per cent, say it will be 'bad'.

Why such polarisation? In Washington there is, to start with, the repressed racial tension endemic in many US cities. But blacks here also see Barry as a victim of the whites of NW, and say the white US government establishment spent millions of dollars (true) to entrap a black politician when it would not have pursued a similarly prominent, but clearly deeply troubled, white politician.

There is more than a grain of truth to this: I can think of at least one well-known white politician who is (or certainly was) at least as notorious a womaniser as Barry and who is said to have (or have had) a perhaps even more serious cocaine problem - but there has been no indication that the FBI ever pursued him with hidden cameras.

Being the brilliant grassroots politician that he is, Barry is exploiting all this with enormous panache. He has become more black, figuratively speaking, answering to the name of 'Anwar Amal' ('Brightest Hope'), wearing African clothes, and going to a new Afro-Baptist church. Far from being a convicted criminal cowering in shame, he has metamorphosed into a victim of white oppression, a man whose very disgrace has become visible stigmata of the suffering classes.

I can't, somehow, see any of this happening in a British city. Racism is neither so entrenched nor so enduring as it is in the US; it is Washington's profound sadness that its socioeconomic indicators should revolve almost exclusively around race. Holloway Road and its environs are the epitome of brotherly love by comparison.