The Center That Keeps Race in the Room

What does it look like when a university decides that race isn't just a topic — it's the whole lens? Meet the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture.

There's an institution sitting at 5733 South University Avenue that has been quietly — and not so quietly — shaping how scholars, students, artists, and communities think about race in America. It's not a think tank funded by corporate donors. It's not a diversity initiative designed to check a box. It's the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture (CSRPC) at the University of Chicago, and for nearly three decades, it has been one of the most serious intellectual spaces in the country dedicated to understanding what race actually does — to our lives, our politics, and our city.

And it started right here.

How It Began

In May 1996, University of Chicago faculty gathered for a founding conference called "Race and Voice: Challenges for the 21st Century." That conference launched the CSRPC, with political scientist Professor Michael C. Dawson as its inaugural director.

Dawson wasn't a stranger to this work. He'd spent his career studying the political behavior and ideology of Black Americans — how people make decisions, form communities, and resist systems that were never built with them in mind. He understood something that many institutions were still reluctant to say plainly: you cannot understand American politics, culture, or daily life without putting race at the center of the analysis.

So that's exactly what the Center set out to do.

What the Center Actually Does

The CSRPC is an interdisciplinary program — meaning its scholars come from political science, sociology, history, literature, the arts, and beyond. But the mission is clear: promote engaged scholarship and debate around race and ethnicity, and examine how those forces shape people's real, everyday lives.

From the beginning, the Center made a deliberate choice to look beyond the Black/white binary that had dominated most academic conversations about race. Researchers here study racialized communities across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Asian Pacific, and Europe. They examine how race intersects with gender, class, sexuality, and national identity — because they understand that none of these things exist in isolation.

For nearly 30 years, CSRPC has led conversations about the impact of race and racism on campus, in Chicago, and across the country and world. They do this through:

• Interdisciplinary research that pushes beyond traditional academic silos
• Public programming — lectures, panels, workshops, and community events — that are open to more than just the university crowd
• Fellowships and funding that support the next generation of scholars
• An Artist-in-Residence program in partnership with UChicago's Arts + Public Life, hosting Chicago-based artists whose work is rooted in South Side communities and themes of race, culture, and justice
• Co-sponsoring events with student organizations, campus partners, and community institutions

This is not a Center that publishes research and files it away. Their whole point is engagement — bringing ideas into contact with the people and communities those ideas are actually about.

Why It Mattered — and Still Does

For a long time, the CSRPC was the only formal unit at the University of Chicago exclusively dedicated to the study of race. That's a significant thing. One of the most powerful private research universities in the world, sitting in the middle of Chicago's South Side, and for decades, this Center was holding that ground alone.

That changed in February 2022, when UChicago's Faculty Senate voted to establish the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity — a full academic department with degree-granting power, something students and faculty had been calling for for decades. The CSRPC's near-30 years of work helped build the foundation that made that department possible.

But the Center didn't step back. It stepped into a new role — continuing as a research institute, community hub, and public programming anchor while the new department took on undergraduate and graduate education. Two vital institutions, working in the same direction.

What's Ahead

The CSRPC continues to evolve, actively reconceptualizing its mission for the moment we're living in. They are building relationships across the University and the city, engaging South Side communities, hosting conferences and workshops, and supporting scholars and artists doing work that matters.

They're not asking whether race is relevant. They're asking what it requires of us — as thinkers, as neighbors, as citizens. That's a question we recognize here on the South Side, because we've been living inside that answer our whole lives.

Catch Them This Month

The CSRPC is closing out May with a community celebration — and you don't have to be a UChicago student or faculty member to pay attention to the work they're doing.

Coming up:

🎉 CSGS/CSRPC/RDI Year-End BBQ — May 21, 2026 A joint end-of-year celebration with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Community, conversation, and good food — the way all good academic years should end.

📅 See their full May events calendar and everything else they have coming up: 👉 View CSRPC's Events Calendar

The Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture is located at 5733 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637. You can reach them at [email protected] or (773) 702-8063.

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