“TAKE IT ALL” reads the caption on Chris Rudd’s Instagram story, overlaying a video of looters emptying a Gucci retail store and a Walgreens in downtown Chicago. The incident followed an explosive face-off between police and demonstrators after cops shot a young man in the predominantly Black, south-side neighborhood of Englewood.
There are rewards, of course, to win in a society that is rigged in every way to make one fail. But no doubt it’s exhausting. And there is something a little weary in Rudd’s demeanor, like he wishes someone else would take the steering wheel occasionally so he can look out the window. Call him sage or an old soul, but I have the distinct impression that Rudd was always a grown-up, even as a little kid.
Still Rudd’s expectations are measured. “In order to be anti-racist, you have to be anti-capitalist,” he says. “I don’t think we can actually ever be an anti-racist institution. We can be a better place, a more inclusive place. But I think racism is built into the DNA of capitalism.” The location of the school itself is rife with racist history, having been deliberately cut off by city officials from the once thriving Black neighborhood of Bronzeville by the placement of the Dan Ryan expressway in the early 60s in an effort to segregate the neighborhoods.
Rolling his eyes at the gang banging that was predominant as a young student at Bogan High School in Chicago’s southwest-side Ashburn neighborhood, he instead got into a graffiti crew and did hip-hop battles. “That’s all they wanted to do was gang bang. I’m like this hip hop kid, and they were like, ‘Who the fuck is he?’ They had me in honors and I hated that because they isolate you, so I flunked out immediately. I was like, ‘Put me in regular.’ So I was like—just me.”
Despite his quickly rising status in the Chicago design community, Rudd’s careful to maintain that he knows he has to be ready to walk away from it all, if his anti-capitalist and anti-racist ideas ever become too confrontational to the powers that be. “What I’m saying is real cool and ‘timely’ right now, but the moment it gets to be too much, they’ll take it away . . . We know how to survive that.”
“When we talk about anti-racism, one of the things that people rarely talk about is violence,” Rudd says. “I grew up in a house where you punch Klan members in the mouth. That was something you should do. It’s not just about reading a bunch of text books—it’s how are you combating these ideas and these practices.”
