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A piece on Chicago’s status as the most segregated city in the country in today’s Tribune got me thinking about this photo I snapped back in college as part of a final project for an African-American literature class I was in.

As the only white male in the class, I often felt my classmates’ eyes turning toward me as we discussed story after story about slavery, Emmett Till and works by Langston Hughes.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Chicago CTA, the Red Line runs straight north and south. This was taken at the Harrison stop, which, unless there is a Sox game going on, is pretty much the unofficial second-to-last stop on the Red Line for whites before the train becomes overwhelmingly black.

(For an interesting social experiment sometime, get on the Red Line during the evening rush at Belmont or Fullerton and ride it south to Roosevelt. I guarantee your ratio of whites to blacks will completely flip itself by the time you get off.)

I’ve always had to explain this photo to all my white friends, but as I unveiled it in class that day the gasps I heard and back-slaps I received after helped my status change from just another whiteboy from the suburbs to a whiteboy from the suburbs who gets it.