Can this election heal race divide?

THE Classic Creations barber shop sits empty, surrounded by drunks and shuttered shopfronts just two blocks from the manicured lawns of Grosse Pointe Park. The contrast isn't lost on LaVar Anthony, a young barber who speaks in riddles of race, class and politics.

"What's already understood," he said without looking up from his Ebony magazine, "don't need to be explained."

But when it comes to race, what is understood? And what is misunderstood?

In search of explanations, two reporters – one black, one white – listened to people of both races along Detroit's divides: Alter Road, which separates the city from the Grosse Pointe near Lake St Clair, and 8 Mile Road, the vast northern border between a mostly black Detroit and its mostly white suburbs.

People of both races living just blocks apart spoke of each other like strangers. There is suspicion, contempt – and yet, for many, a desperate hope in a traditionally Democrat city that Barack Obama's presidential candidacy might be the final step in the United States' long path to racial equality.

It is here you meet decent people with much in common – both sides of 8 Mile Road are populated by blue-collar families struggling in the ailing economy. But many still can't get past their racial differences.

Whites said their neighbours consider blacks to be violent and solely responsible for problems in the black community.

Blacks said many of their own consider whites to be spoiled and condescending.

But hardly anybody acknowledged their own prejudices. Both blacks and whites instead blamed "they", a vague and unaccountable surrogate for their own racial attitudes.

"They" are whites who say Obama is unqualified when they really mean he's black.

"They" are blacks who say all whites are bigots.

Mr Anthony knows who "they" are. "It's understood that there's still a lot of racism that goes on out there," the barber said . "A lot of white people look down on blacks as being lazy or whatever.

Four of every ten white Americans hold at least a partly negative view of blacks, calling them "lazy", or "violent" or blaming them for the ills of blacks in the US, according to a recent AP-Yahoo poll.

"My kids have been called nigger babies.. That was from a white family," said Cherlonda Hampton, 37, a black woman shopping at an outdoor mall on 8 Mile Road.

A petite mother of nine who looks half her 37 years, Ms Hampton said she was harassed by whites while living in suburban Detroit.

"I work at a grocery store and I know a lot of people who are not going to vote for (Obama) because of the racial thing," said Colleen Mullins, a white woman who lives with her husband Daniel in a black neighbourhood south of 8 Mile Road.

"I'm hoping Obama wins because he's for the middle class," says Mark Coccia, 48, outside a suburban post office just north of Detroit. He's white, a laid-off factory worker and lifelong Democrat who's about to declare bankruptcy.

Mr Coccia agrees with Mr Obama's politics and admires the Illinois Democrat. But Mr Coccia can't move beyond race."They can't blame the white man," he says of blacks. "Their own colour sold them into slavery."

Mr Coccia believes that Mr McCain will die in office if elected and leave Sarah Palin as president. He said: "That is not right. What kind of choice do guys like me have? A black guy or a woman. It's a lesser of two evils.

"If Obama was a white candidate… . but people are going to judge by the colour of his skin. Not me, mind you," Mr Coccia added. "But they will."

Though race relations are nowhere near as bad as they were in the 1960s, a white person can live for years in the suburbs without ever coming in contact with a black and, conversely, a Detroiter can grow up in the city without getting to know a white suburbanite.

Here, it's unfamiliarity that can breed contempt – or at least misunderstanding.

Two blocks from Mr Anthony's barber shop in Detroit, James Turnbull, 71, of Grosse Pointe Park takes a break from his gardening to show off his prized blooms. Before long, the conversation turns to race, class and politics. He refers – casually and without malice – to the pickanninies, an outdated and pejorative word for a black child, he encountered as a young man working in the south.

Separated by a short walk – from Mr Anthony's barber shop to Mr Turnbull's blooms – are two ways of life: Porsches north of Alter Road, bus stops to the south; awnings decorating shopfronts to the north; bars and steel doors protecting shops to south; white and black drivers across the street from one another at unofficially segregated petrol stations.

Not that Mr Turnbull minds. "You live here, you don't see it," he said. But he does notice a group of young, black men walking south, into Detroit.

"You see them?" he pointed. "Some folks would look at them and say, 'There go three potential gang members.' I would hope that I would see just a bunch of kids."

Power of the white-flighters will influence result

DETROIT is an apt place to talk about race in America. The city's population peaked at nearly two million in the 1950s, dropping to fewer than one million in the latest US census figures. Although racial tension is not the only cause, the 1967 race riots – caused by police heavy-handedness towards blacks – hastened Detroit's decline, and mandatory school bussing a decade later, in which children were made to mix with those of another race, stoked unrest.

Coleman A Young, the city's first black mayor and a racially polarising figure, said before his death in 1997: "No other city in America, no other city in the western world has lost the population at that rate. And what's at the root cause of that loss? Economics and race. Or, should I say, race and economics?"

White working-class Detroiters fled the city and were among the first to be dubbed "Reagan Democrats" – socially conservative, economically progressive, mostly Catholic voters who abandoned the Democratic party for the Republican.

Their children and grandchildren are just as politically independent – swing voters in a swing county that both Mr Obama and Mr McCain hope to carry en route to winning Michigan.