By David Phillips, Special to Statehouse Report | I think that is a great question for us all to consider. The seeds of the bad fruit are still scattered throughout our community in South Carolina. We need to work on many levels to help resolve this problem. We need to have more dialogue in comfortable settings, and we need to discuss the challenges with racial tensions and to try to sew love and isolate those whose efforts seek to create disagreement, bitterness and hate.
My personal feeling is that our public officials in the greater Charleston area have been working for years to address this problem and ease the concerns of the African American community, and the African American leaders have been letting their voices be heard for years, so there has been an exchange and even dialogue. My feeling is that because this discussion has been happening, our leaders knew that people of all faiths and all colors want to get along and to prosper and grow a loving and more tolerant community. That is why, in my humble opinion, we did not have riots in Charleston. The victims of violence and their families were such people of strong faith that they taught the rest of us, and the nation, how to walk out the faith of forgiveness and hope.
Yet to do justice to the nine human beings who were massacred at Mother Emanuel AME Church, we have to work to see that there is progress at a quickening pace. We, as a community of white, black, Latino and all races—and we as a community of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindi, Buddhist and no faith traditions — need to have a wider and deeper discussion of the things that we have in common, and we need to celebrate our common humanity. We need to discuss our differences—beliefs, customs, ideas, passions, hopes and dreams. We need to celebrate our distinctiveness and marvel at how each of us wants to live in peace and safety.
Each of us wants to love and be loved by family and friends. Each of us wants a better future for our children. But each of us looks different and each one of us approaches their lives differently. We need to try to learn more about each other so that we might learn how to appreciate each other, respect one another and ultimately to love one another.
- We should be teaching children to love all people at an early age, and teach them the evils of discrimination among any kind of people. We are all interconnected; we are all intertwined.
- We should not tolerate civic and social leaders who are insensitive to the struggle. If we cannot acknowledge something is wrong — and that there are undercurrents of racial tension throughout our society — we cannot address it and bring healing remedy.
- We can create a monthly recurring series of meetings to which we could invite accomplished speakers and leaders in reconciliation, healing and growing closer together. A casual and open forum with rules for polite and frank exchange that is moderated by trained leaders can help to heal wounds which have been bound, but are not yet healed properly and may not be likely to heal without an opportunity to vent. Perhaps alumni from the Diversity Leadership Institute at Furman University could participate as resource people and help promote attendance, etc.
- We can encourage the press to cover positive stories of cooperative and collaborative work in the community to show people that most peace officers are honorable and ethical (like the North Charleston citations for doing good—brainchild of Bill Stanfield), and we should also encourage the media to shine a bright light wherever there is even a perception of evil or deceit with regard to discrimination and inequity.
- We can encourage our political leaders to work hard to find ways to better educate the people in the rural and poorer sections of South Carolina (the corridor of inequity and shame).
- We can demand that our political leaders find ways to release the thousands of nonviolent offenders warehoused in our S.C. Department of Corrections and invest significant resources in the best programs for reducing recidivism (The Jumpstart program takes recidivism from the normal rates of 50 percent to 70 percent to under 5 percent.) South Carolina spent some $450 million locking up and maintaining prisons, but it spends a negligible amount preparing these men and women to re-enter society effectively and successfully.
- We should encourage business leaders to ‘Ban the Box’ or the checkbox on job applications that ask, “Have you ever been arrested.” Or, at the very least, encourage them to give a man/woman another chance by providing a state tax credit, just like the one the federal government provides.
- We should expand Medicaid in South Carolina, as it will provide as many as 40,000 jobs, many in rural areas and provide tax dollars for the state (every one of those new jobs pays taxes for income). It would lead to a healthier, happier and more secure family structure for at least 200,000 people. It would lower infant mortality dramatically and ensure that more mothers got prenatal care, which in turn would reduce the enormous expense when a premature babies arrive and the both the mother’s and the baby’s health are in jeopardy (but nobody has insurance, so the public and private insurers pay the bill).
These are some of the things that we can do. These, in addition to the many things that nonprofit organizations continue to do, can bring about true and lasting racial peace and eventually harmony. We must not lose the energy and the opportunity to expose injustice and inequity wherever it is. It is not fair, it is not right and it ought not to be tolerated in a loving and compassionate society—not in the wealthiest country on earth.
And finally, each of us as individuals needs to walk this talk, to love — or at least respect each other — and to hold each other accountable to the rigorous pursuit of social justice and equity
David G. Phillips is president of Custom Development Solutions, a Mount Pleasant-based fundraising consulting firm. More: http://www.cdsfunds.com. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!