ERICA HUBBARD

I was watching Netflix’s new series Death by Lightning. It’s set in Chicago, 1880 - and this establishing scene pops up. In the foreground: •an Asian woman, •two Black men, •and a one-legged man - all walking together downtown. It immediately stuck out to me, so I looked up the actual demographics for Chicago in 1880. Here’s what the numbers say: •Chicago’s population: about 503,000 •Black population: 6,500 (≈1.3%) •Chinese population: 172 total (≈0.03%) •Chinese women? About 3% of that - meaning roughly 5 total in the entire city. •Disabled/one-legged men from the Civil War era? Plausible, maybe 0.1–0.2% of the population. So if you ran the math on the odds of seeing all of that - an Asian woman, two Black men, and an amputee - in one random 50-person crowd downtown, it comes out to about 0.00016%, or roughly 1 in 640,000. In other words, Netflix made a scene that’s about as statistically likely as spotting a UFO on your morning commute - but hey, at least the diversity box got checked.