Not long ago I was introduced to a middle-aged lady at her home on a housing estate somewhere north of Newcastle. I’d gone with a friend who was from the area and was keen to catch up on local news. What’s so-and-so up to, he asked. “Oh, her,” said our hostess, smiling pleasantly and passing round biscuits. “She ran off with a dirty Paki.” There was pin-drop silence for about three seconds and then my friend said: “India is half Asian.”

You have three options in this situation: you give voice to the internal Tourette’s that started up the minute the sentence was uttered – gratifying, but brutal. Or you say nothing, even though your armpits are prickling; or you cravenly say, “Oh gosh, doesn’t matter at all, I couldn’t mind less”, leaving out the second half of the sentence, which is “because people like you are irrelevant to me”. As of last week there’s a fourth option: yes, I’m brown, like the 44th president of the United States.

The lady in question was mortified by her faux pas and tried to wriggle out of it in increasingly desperate ways – the usual, ie, don’t mind me, it’s just the way I talk, I’m from a different generation, sticks and stones, eh, and so on. And then, the master-stroke: “I thought you were . . . Portuguese.” This was so startling that I laughed and the situation was defused.

The ludicrousness of the statement aside, I can understand why our hostess would say this, and her confusion is at the root of Barack Obama’s triumph and at the centre of the demonstrably changing world. She said it because certain people still find it almost impossible to make sense of the combination of having brown skin and being middle class or, God forbid, “posh”. My accent, to this lady, meant I couldn’t possibly be “a dirty Paki”, and my shoes, my handbag, my job and everything else about me also, somehow, blanked out the colour of my skin.

If she’d been wicked, rather than thoughtless, the combination could well have driven her mad: outside London and the more evolved large cities, the traditional view is that black or brown people are all very well in their known place – driving a bus, cleaning a lavatory, selling cheap booze, being good at maths, medicine or singing. But a brown or black person who earns much more than you? Whose employee you might be? Whose house is much bigger and whose lifestyle you envy? That’s too much; that can’t be borne.

I spent the later part of last week worrying almost obsessively about Obama’s safety – and that of his family – for this reason. It’s not that some redneck nutjob will want to shoot him because he’s black. They’ll want to get him because he’s black and middle class and rich and powerful: not poor, not slightly broken, not grateful for a seat on the bus or a McJob. Being black and middle class is part of the reason white people voted for him: his skin may be brown but he is a recognisable quantity, with his suits and his Harvard degree and the fact (probably) that his children eat pesto. The black middle class is sizeable in America; that isn’t yet true of Britain, where it seems invisible.

The class/race issue confuses many. I’ve had people pretend I was white since I was a child, despite the evidence of their own eyes. I am café au lait: this means I’ve been asked if I was Spanish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, South American. I don’t think anyone would have asked me if my family ran a corner shop and I had an Indian accent or wore a sari (although it’s always fun to stick one on: if people have only ever seen you in heels and dresses, you can see their bewilderment). I don’t think anyone genuinely wonders if I am Spanish; I think my middle-classness automatically “promotes” me to being manageably European, rather then problematically “foreign”.

There have been countless other promotions of this kind: at stuffy dinners in the country, some old buffoon will volunteer his views on immigration, for instance, blind to the brownness of my skin or the blackness of my hair, seeing only what he wants to see, which is someone who speaks with the same accent and went to the “right” schools (I’ve been asked, more times than seems possible, what it was like being Princess Diana’s bridesmaid – the bridesmaid being one India Hicks, a white, blonde, English rose product of the Mountbatten dynasty). Once, in Scotland, I was told off for explaining to someone that “Chinee” wasn’t actually a word and that letting your children call people “darkies” in the 21st century is just dandy in the back of beyond, but that it might be an idea to rethink the vocab if they ever left home.

Often, my unasked for (and unloved) promotion will grant me exemption, as in “bloody Pakis – but not you, of course”. Prejudiced people will assume I am as bigoted as they are, rant about blacks being drug dealers and be astonished when I say I feel closer to said people, dealers included, than I do to white racists. My sister was once watching an England-Australia game in a bar in Sydney but had to leave when the crowd started chanting: “Oh I’d rather be a Paki than a Pom”, which was awkward, what with her being both.

Things have changed, of course, since I spent my teens looking either weirdly pink or weirdly grey because it was impossible to buy foundation in any shade other than “for white people”, or since my late paternal grandmother used to refer to me as “Eurasian” and stare at my mother benignly as though she were some exotic parrot, rather than an overeducated university graduate who spoke three languages.

But they haven’t changed that much– as my opening anecdote demonstrates. It is almost unimaginably exciting to think of the Obamas occupying the White House, for race reasons as well as for political ones. The worry – their safety aside – is that his election will be seen as a sort of global QED, taken to show that race is no longer an issue. It wasn’t for 52% of voters, granted, but I’ll eat my hat if Obama’s social class wasn’t a persuasive bonus. For some of the 47% of people who didn’t vote Democrat, I would guess his middle-classness stuck in the craw even more than the colour of his skin. Nevertheless: the brown middle class has a visible champion at last and he is the leader of the free world. I’m hoping I’ll never be asked if I’m Portuguese again.

+ It seems almost quaint to still be banging on about the evils of ultra-violent video games – I think I first wrote about them six or seven years ago. In the intervening period the initial outrage has died down and nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with young people spending hours in front of a computer shooting people in the face. I still think there is. Aside from the question of fatness – all these lard buckets ever do is sit on their behinds – there is a thin and relatively easily crossable line between online fantasy and real-time reality.

This is very true in the case of pornography, which everyone watches and claims not to and which has had a demonstrable effect on people’s sex lives: it used to be you suspected your husband of having a mistress if he suddenly broadened his repertoire – now you know he just watches porn.

It is even truer in the case of violence, as per Ryan Chinnery, 19, who was last week jailed indefinitely for carrying out late-night attacks on women. Chinnery’s two hobbies were porn and Grand Theft Auto. The latter, despite its 18 classification, is a game owned by a vast number of young teenagers. It is often bought for them by their parents. I wonder how many of those teenagers’ mothers have watched the game. If you’re one of those who hasn’t, go on – have a little look through all the levels – and drop me a line if you really don’t see what I’m droning on about.

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