Atlanta and America have never participated in reparations for its genocide, land theft, and displacement of indigenous peoples, its kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples, or its destabilization, colonization and assassinations in other nations. So, in 2018, what we are still faced with is the displacement, incarceration, and murder of black and brown people in this city, this country, and this globe.
Photo credit: Credit: Ryan Vizzions / IG: @amodernghost
By Christopher HollisTuesday August 28, 2018 04:50 PM EDT
Christopher Hollis is a musician, painter, and activist grounded in Atlanta. He studies creative writing at Georgia State University and is an active volunteer at Radio Free Georgia (WRFG 89.3FM) where he hosts Rhythm and Resistance, a bimonthly program that broadcasts independent music and community activists.
Christopher Hollis: Atlanta and America have never participated in reparations for its genocide, land theft, and displacement of indigenous peoples, its kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples, or its destabilization, colonization and assassinations in other nations.
So, in 2018, what we are still faced with is the displacement, incarceration, and murder of black and brown people in this city, this country, and this globe.
Pick an issue and it can be categorized within that reality. Here in Atlanta we speak the names Deravis Caine Rogers, Kathryn Johnston, and Anthony Hill; all murdered by the state. Atlanta sends its officers into an apartheid state, Israel, to train in militarized techniques used on Palestinians. It’s called GILEE, and its home is with Georgia State, the university that bought Turner Field and wouldn’t enter into a community benefits agreement with the neighborhood organizations, where the Beltline runs through, and the privatization of public resources looms. There is no one, isolated problem. There is a systemic problem.
Christopher Hollis: Engage in a diversity of tactics. Specific solutions vary, but the best visions for a better world are articulated when engaging with those who experience the oppression. This is true no matter the tactic — literature, music, legislation, and activism. We must support those most affected and the organizations that do the work, in whatever service we have in this life.
Today, as I write this on August 21, the national prison strike has begun. It’s still Black August. Just this morning, Freedom University released a report detailing the experiences and conditions of undocumented students in Georgia, where they are unable to attend higher education at major public education institutions. Project South recently released a report about the conditions “Inside Atlanta’s Immigrant Cages,” and they echo the call with other organizations like GLAHR (Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights) to shut down ACDC (Atlanta City Detention Center) and end the city’s contract with ICE. Tenant organizers such as those at the Forest Cove apartments in Thomasville, along with the Housing Justice League, are demanding better living conditions and the right to return to their apartments. Sanitation workers are striking. College faculty and students are fighting for a union. The trial for Robert Olsen, who murdered Anthony Hill, will be coming up soon.
Christopher Hollis: I participate in protesting in the streets. I believe in visibility and reclamation of space in times of mourning and resistance. Or any time. I beat the drum. But I don’t want to default to that as the touchstone for grassroots activism.
This past week, my mind has been engaged with the memory and life of two beautiful black organizers that transitioned on: Monte Qarlo and Kiwan Benson. Both engaged in grassroots activism through performance, curations, and relationships in and around black TLGBQ identity and experience. Where they saw fit to critique, they engaged with their community and created music, identity, solidarity, and principle, all rooted in liberation and abolition. Wherever one finds a home, creates a home with and for their people, amidst all this pain in life, that is where you will find the flower. That is where the grassroots come out of.
Christopher Hollis: It’s a tool. Use it. Strategically. These platforms, these technologies, are extensions of ourselves, as Marshall McLuhan would point out. We are curating our own broadcasting through these communities, and there have been great exchanges of information and organizing with them. However, always be in control of your own narrative and your own history. Share these ideas and strategies outside of those networks. We must not forget about those who don’t participate, for many reasons, in various technologies. Oftentimes the most impactful exchanges are in person, in the grass, amongst the roots.
Christopher Hollis: WRFG Atlanta 89.3FM. Radio Free Georgia. One of our best sources for local progressive media. My participation as a listener and volunteer with the station has been fundamental in my political education and community activism. In its 45 years, WRFG has and continues to broadcast the voices and information of those who experience oppression and exploitation and those who resist it.
Christopher Hollis: I would like to trouble the word Hate. It can often make us see the perpetration as individual instead of systemic. I’m also very concerned at how hate crime legislation has directed funds to the very police and prisons that are murdering and incarcerating oppressed people. But I think one of the things we can do is identify it. Call it out by its name. Don’t be afraid to voice what you are critiquing. Let it be heard and let it be righteous. Folks like to be universalist sometimes, but we just don’t all experience the same oppression or lived experiences. So we need to participate in solidarity. Say No to apartheid. Say No to deportations. Say No to oil pipelines. Say No to prisons. And then engage.
What moves you? What’s your jam? Do you cook, paint, phone-bank, donate, play music, legal observe, put a stamp on an envelope? There is a way to incorporate your service to movement. It is moving, it is kinetic, it engages. What’s unacceptable is non-participation.
One of the most important problems facing Americans today is our loss of focus on living together as one nation. Because we are more divided in many ways, we are losing ground in the global landscape and will not be able to compete on a global scale if we don’t figure out how to work in accordance with one another.
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There are so many problems we’re facing, it’s overwhelming: systemic racism, sexism, ageism, inequity, homelessness, marginalization, immigration policy, school shootings/gun violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, climate change … this is an incomplete list, and I feel sick to my stomach thinking about it. Much of it stems from hatred and fear of “the other.” It feels like we’ve lost a basic sense of human decency.
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I want very badly to name the issues of poverty, wealth inequality, and class oppression, but all of these are intertwined with, and compounded by, the problem of race, difference, and grappling honestly with America’s history and identity. I have a metaphor for this process, it is a cracked egg with the yoke running long.
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Healthcare is a human right. That means ensuring that every person doesn’t just have access to health care, but has the ability to afford health care.
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Apathy towards injustice is toxic. We have become so entangled in conversational clouds on social media that we honestly feel that ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ are making a direct impact. This helps to a certain degree, but it does not solve the problems plaguing our nation today.
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The biggest problem facing Americans today is the stark difference between where we have made progress in this country under the Obama Administration and where the Trump Administration is going. With regards to the Trump Administration right now on immigration and voting rights, we believe they are moving in a direction against the values of most Americans.
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I believe that racial discord remains the most divisive issue facing Americans. It continues to suppress wages for all and promotes anger that leads to violence within the oppressed communities. Remove racist symbolism and implement long-term remedies to counter the long-term legacies of discrimination.
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Of all the global issues facing us, including biggies like climate change and nuclear war, what troubles me currently is the rise of fascism in governments around the world. This is what also troubles me about America. People are emboldened to openly discriminate and hate because our elected officials represent values of hate.
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The most important problem facing Americans today is partisan politics that removes empathy from the conversation toward compromise on the real issues that are affecting everyday Americans. Everything is viewed through the lens of tribal political division, when the solutions to most problems facing the nation can be solved through bipartisan collaboration.
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There are so many things that need to be fixed but somehow we need to stop the OTHER mentality. Trying to embrace difference — and understanding that our differences are what make us stronger — will lead to a better unity within our populations. We spend so much time hating and singling out those that are different. If we used that energy to come together we could make a better life for all of us.
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Atlanta and America have never participated in reparations for its genocide, land theft, and displacement of indigenous peoples, its kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples, or its destabilization, colonization and assassinations in other nations. So, in 2018, what we are still faced with is the displacement, incarceration, and murder of black and brown people in this city, this country, and this globe.
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The most important problem facing all of us is our increasing inability to work with and get along with those who don’t share our views. I know it’s a cliché, but “United we stand, divided we fall.”
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The most serious issue for all Americans is the very real risk of our democracy being taken away, which is happening on a daily basis. There are so many issues: racism, human rights, climate change denial, guns, income equality, lack of a universal heathcare system, police brutality, tearing refugee families apart and putting them in interment camps, our status in the world and how we interact with other nations, and a government party in charge that refuses to act in the best interest of the American people.
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The greatest problem facing USA citizens today, is how to become a global citizen without having an imperialist or colonial mentality. The greatest problem facing Atlanta today is how to move from the white and black mentality to become a multicultural city in action and not in words only.
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Greed. The only consistent measure of success is wealth. If you’re so good, so smart, so talented, why aren’t you rich? Why should anybody listen to you? You’re accomplished, but if you’re poor, you haven’t “succeeded.” Rich, therefore smart. Rich, therefore good. There’s a paucity of everything, so you’d better have dough. If you’re needy, it’s because that’s what you deserve. Loss of wealth is loss of power, loss of status.
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The most important problem is the denial of the problem. Most white people have been lulled into the myth of a “post-racial” America. Research on implicit bias and the persistence of numerous forms of institutional racism, including in the criminal justice system, demonstrate the reality of racism in 2018. A much greater threat than hate crimes and organized white supremacists is our inability to address core issues like white privilege and internalized white supremacy. We cannot progress until we have that honest reckoning. Atlanta paints itself as the city “too busy to hate,” but it’s been too busy to do the real work to begin to heal the very old wounds of its racist history.
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The most important problem facing Americans today is the pervasive ideology of white settler colonialism. By this I mean that we live with a way of thinking brought over to America that goes back as far as the English Reformation in the 16th century — the belief that God has ordained a select group of white people to claim land — regardless of who might already have been on it — as a God-given right.
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“The most important problem facing Americans today” is that we have so many problems that rotate in and out of first place that we cannot choose and therefore cannot answer the question. The second part of the question is easier (for me). Atlanta’s most important problem is a subset of a national problem.
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A decline in trust. We’re losing opportunities to get to know each other. We spend all kinds of time and money creating our own private, secluded spaces, both in the physical world and online, where we don’t have to encounter people who look or think differently than we do.
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The most urgent problem facing not just Atlanta, but all of humanity, is the fact the U.S. is now ruled by a fascist regime (Trump/Pence) set on reshaping society in a way that will be catastrophic for humanity and the planet.
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One of the most important problems facing America is the widening income inequality/economic mobility gap. For many, the “American Dream” is just that, a dream they will never realize. Many of the social and political challenges we are dealing with today stem from this problem.
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The list is long and it’s all really important. But most of the things on that list have a root cause, and I think it’s greed. People’s desire for power and wealth outweighs their humanity and their ability to see humanity in others.
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