MY CLOSEST FRIEND is black. We met at Oxford 28 years ago when our tutor told us that I was the “working-class experiment” and that she was the “black experiment”. Those words defined our Oxbridge experience from Day 1 - we both had something to prove, and something to disprove, and neither of us has ever forgotten how it felt. I went on my own Orwellian counter-road from Wigan Pier, or Accrington to be exact, trying to preserve pride and difference, while fighting off the patronising stereotypes. I remember the editor at Faber who turned down my second novel The Passion, saying to my agent Pat Kavanagh that I would write a better book if I recognised my limits (ie, working class/northern/gay) and had I thought of a sequel to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit?

Last week, when Barack Obama became President-elect, my friend said that for the first time in her life she felt that the word “black” was no longer a word of limitation. For her, the word itself had suddenly expanded - it was now the same size as the word “white”.

Vicky Licorish is a TV producer, and for the past four years has fought to bring Andrea Levy's novel Small Island to the screen. It is the story of the experience of Caribbean people coming to find a new life in Britain in the 1940s. The novel won the Orange Prize, and has sold in vast quantities. It is a very personal project for my friend - whose parents came over from St Lucia - and also a book she believes in for its own sake, as an important piece of work.

Part of her battle has been dealing with outdated ideas that Small Island would be “minority television”. I had the same problem when the BBC made Oranges Are Not the Only fruit - would it be too northern, too gay? That was 1990 and well before working-class chic and same-sex kisses became TV fashion. It went on to win two Bafta awards.

There is a lot of talk about diversity, but the fact is that in TV and film, the language of programming - how projects are conceived, pitched, sold - while never racist, and never intentionally excluding, remains in a white middle-class world, where “quota” projects are more about box-ticking than passionate engagement.

Vicky used to say: “The only black people I ever meet at the BBC are security guards and cleaners - oh and Lenny Henry.”

The BBC's commitment to adapting Small Island as its major drama for next year should be celebrated as a victory over anxieties about what is minority and what is mainstream, from frets over gay/straight, white/black. We need to recognise, as fiction always does, that every voice has a story to tell, and that by hearing those stories and those voices - accents unfamiliar, language strange - our tolerance deepens and our understanding grows.

Everyone knows that learning to speak another language means learning to hear another language - and that is the hardest part of it. I can read pretty easily in French but I still go into spasm on the first days of my visits there. The ear has to retune.

Barack Obama has been very good at retuning the ears of America. He hasn't remade himself as a white man - he is an educated, intelligent black man who speaks beautifully, but who doesn't speak Alan Garner's hated “white man's business English”. That he has Martin Luther King's passionate oratory as well as John F. Kennedy's instinct away from the sentimental is rousing Americans back to the possibilities of an authentic language. The mistrust of articulacy that characterises Bush and Palin - and the stupidity that lies behind their clumsiness with language - will be challenged at every level by a man who speaks plainly yet poetically. Obama is different, not only in what he says, but in how he says it. That he is black cannot be factored out - the colour-blind policies of equality are well meaning, but what gets lost is the benefit of difference; the Obama difference is invigorating the language as much as the politics.

Change needs the language of change; what we hear, what we read, either reinforces or challenges our position, which is why it is so important to read widely, and outside of the limits of our own interests.

Fiction is very good at opening our eyes and ears to experiences that are not ours, to a way of speaking that is not our way of speaking. Readers are eavesdroppers who pick up new languages. Nothing could be a better education for change.

Small Island is scheduled for transmission on BBC1 in autumn 2009

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