BRACK: Fear must not win in South Carolina

By Andy Brack |  In the midst of the pall cast over the state following the Charleston church massacre, you might have missed last week’s Miss South Carolina pageant.

Ten days after the shootings that left nine dead and shocked the world, the show went on in Township Auditorium in Columbia. What came out of it highlights the stuff South Carolina is really made of.

When 22-year-old Clemson student and contestant Daja Dial of Spartanburg was asked during the pageant about what should be done about the Confederate flag on Statehouse grounds, she said:

“It’s a new South Carolina. We have made so much progress and it’s time to take it down. As Miss South Carolina, I can lead this state into a new era. And that flag being taken down is representative of that. I’m in this moment now for a reason. God has made this happen for a reason. I think it’s time for us to show what South Carolina is really like.”

Later after being crowned the new Miss South Carolina, Dial went further: “Why have that still there when we’ve made so much progress. Let’s put it in a museum where it belongs.”

Daja Dial

Dial, the third African American to hold the state title, channeled what many in South Carolina believe and what the world has seen since the June 17 shootings.

On July 6, members of the legislature will meet to talk about taking the flag off the Statehouse grounds following a bipartisan June 22 plea led by Gov. Nikki Haley. According to various media surveys, there appear to be enough votes to remove the flag, a symbol of heritage to some, but a representation of fear and hatred to more.

Steve Skardon, executive director of the nonprofit Palmetto Project, suggests to those who don’t want to see the flag come down that they won’t really lose anything.

“It’s not being abolished,” said Skardon, whose organization is coordinating a memorial fund to do good works that honor slain state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, reflected. “It simply says that as far as the state goes, it’s not appropriate for the state government to be using that emblem to represent the whole state.”

If debate heats up in the days ahead on the Statehouse floor and turns ugly, let’s keep the whole thing in perspective — taking the flag down doesn’t make it go away. It just makes the Statehouse grounds to be a more neutral ground without a hot-button icon vividly poking many people in their eyes.

We also have to realize that taking the flag down doesn’t mean the fear it inspires in some and hate it represents in others doesn’t make either vanish. In one sense, taking down the flag is easy compared to working together to curb fear and hate.

Through the years, the Palmetto Project has sponsored community forums across the state to deal, in part, with the diversity we have and racial issues that remain. Organizers worked to reach broadly in communities to bring people together to get to know each other, not talk about race.

All parents, Skardon says, have similar dreams — to have good schools, good jobs, safe neighborhoods and bright futures. But when neighbors — white, brown and black — don’t really know people who look different from them, they sometimes worry that somebody else might change their lives. In that environment, fear can grow.

Skardon

“We all want the same vision for our communities, but we just don’t know that,” Skardon says.

What we have to do, just like people in Charleston have done in recent weeks as they mourned, is to come together and get to know each other better.

Creating broad community-wide dialogues — people just getting to know each other better — will make communities healthier and help stamp out the fear that leads us to the dark side, as the character Yoda noted in a movie: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

Fear, anger and hate must not win in South Carolina. Our state is still mourning. But we’re also healing. Daja Dials exist here by the tens of thousands. As outsiders realize that, they’ll change their minds about the Palmetto State. And we’ll blossom, too.