Author: Keyi Liang

Program: Chemistry PhD

Abstract

Chicago is unfortunately racially segregated. The downtown and the North Side are undoubtedly dominated by white people. The south side population is mainly black. In this podcast, Keyi talked about his personal experience related to this problem, analysed possible causes and put forward a suggestion that could possibly break the barrier between different races.

Listen here:

Transcript:

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Welcome to the ELI’s Finding Chicago Global Perspectives Podcast Series for AEPP 2025. I’m your host, Keyi Liang, and I’m currently enrolled in the University of Chicago’s Physical Sciences Division.

Today we are going to talk about racial segregation in Chicago. Even before I came here, I learned that the racial segregation problem in this city is so severe that you can barely see black people’s communities in downtown or the north side, or vice versa, white communities in certain areas in the south side. Moreover, Asian people tend to live in or near Chinatown only, and Mexican immigrants concentrate in the west. I had no idea of how this would look like until I arrived here and took a Red Line train all the way north, from Hyde Park via downtown to the Lake View nightlife area. On the train, I was surprised to see the drastic change of the racial composition of passengers. More than three quarters of people were black before Roosevelt, which was the first station of downtown. But once the train entered the heart of downtown, the proportion of black people began to drop sharply and an increasing number of white passengers began to board. When we crossed the Chicago river to the near north side, almost all passengers were white. On our way back, we observed the same phenomena again, but, of course, in the reverse order. This made me well aware of the racial segregation problem in Chicago for the first time.

Several weeks later when I took the road test for my driver’s licence, I saw the contrast between the south and the north part of the city again. In the Chicago DMV in the north, most of examiners and exam takers were white, whilst more than half of the people were black in the south DMV. In short, however you travel through the city, you will inevitably notice this polarized pattern of racial distribution.

I believe many of you are also confused. Why are people in different races still separated today, several decades after the end of the compulsory legal, racial sepa-ration? There are many historic events and sociological theories to explain for this, like the Great Migration that happened before and after the Second World War, as well as the unevenly distributed socioeconomic recourses in white and black communities due to some historic issues. There are also countless of solutions proposed by social scientists and politicians, such as to promote equal education opportunities for different races and to build more public transportation facilities in marginalized neighborhoods.

But today I’m not gonna focus on these well-established statements. In my opinion, the natural affinity among people in the same race plays a crucial role in (the) racial segregation problem. This affinity is not a bad thing itself, I would say, though, because race does not only mean the color of the skin, but also the culture underlying a group of people. Therefore, it’s completely understandable and natural for culturally similar people to stay together and they could even be a little exclusive. But I would say that too much affinity indeed will make the race segregation problem worse. One good example here; I heard from a friend from California that white people began to move out of their neighborhood when more and more Asian migrants settled down there. Even in universities where there’s no problem as severe as racial segregation, we often observe that students from the same cultural background tend to mingle with each other, and most of the time they can be exclusive just by language. I think it’s time to change this, and maybe we can slightly weaken the affinity a little bit by encouraging more and more deeper communication between people from completely different, racial and cultural backgrounds. Personally, I have already been practising this idea by making friends from different culture, from different countries, like the United States, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and I’m actively looking forward to meeting new people from other nations as well.

All right, our podcast is close to the end. To sum up, racial segregation is an unfortunate truth for Chicago, but people here can actually take action now and make a difference. By interacting more with people in other race, from other countries, who grew up from different cultures, we can hopefully reduce the unevenness of social, of racial distribution and make a truly race-equal city. Thank you for listening.

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