I’m heartened by the fact that recent protests are leading to some important changes regarding police brutality, and that many people and some businesses are stepping up to the plate to make long-needed changes regarding equality.

While this progress is essential, we need to go further. None of these changes address the roots of racism and what is needed to create deep and long-lasting healing.

Racism Has its Roots in Projected Self-Loathing 

Children are not born racists. When they learn racism in their families, they also learn to disconnect from their loving soul essence. Being taught that they are better than others prevents them from seeing that their own souls and the souls of others are sparks of the Divine within each of us.

Parents who judge black people and other minorities, or who judge gays and women, likely judge their children based on looks and performance, rather than seeing and valuing their intrinsic qualities. In this environment, children learn to judge themselves. They learn to loath and reject themselves. A lack of parental love and learned self-judgment disconnects children from their true selves—their loving soul essence.

The more this occurs in their growing-up years, the more children develop their wounded ego self, which is filled with the false beliefs they’ve been programmed to believe about themselves and, just as importantly, about others. Self-judgment creates self-hatred, but because the wounded ego cannot own this self-hatred, it sees itself as one up, and then projects its fears of inadequacy and self-loathing onto people who are different than them.

From this twisted perspective, they dehumanize certain others, and feel entitled to hurt, humiliate, and even kill the people on whom they’ve projected their self-loathing. Incidentally, this projection isn’t limited to people. These same angry, wounded, greedy, and entitled people are much more likely to contribute, unconsciously, to the ongoing assault on our wildlife, our ecosystem, and our planet.

Healing the Roots of Racism

In order for the roots of racism to heal, people need to re-discover their beautiful soul essence. They need to discover that they are not their wounded ego, which they created as part of their survival. Nor are they their programmed false beliefs about themselves and others.

Discovering the beauty of their soul is life changing.

I wasn’t brought up by racist parents. In fact, I was marching with my father for civil rights as a child.

But my parents were very judgmental of me, so I learned to disconnect from my true self, developing a compliant, care-taking, self-abandoning wounded ego self. I took care of everyone but myself, which ultimately led me to a life-threatening illness and a need to re-evaluate my life. This is when I learned to see, value, and love my true self, and connect with my spiritual source of love and truth.

This experience of connecting with myself and my spiritual guidance dramatically changed my life. It led to me experiencing a profound sense of Oneness with all of life—a Oneness that makes it impossible for me to deliberately hurt people, animals, and our planet.

Children Need to Learn This

For racism to heal, all children need to learn, both at home and in school, how to see, value, and love their own beautiful soul essence, which will enable them to see the beautiful soul essence of everyone. When we operate from our heart and soul rather than from our wounded ego, we cannot harm others. It’s vital that each of us, as adults, do our own inner work to learn to see and value ourselves so we can see and value all of life, and so we can see, value, and love the souls of our children. This is how they will learn to love themselves and love others.

Learning to love our true self and the true self of everyone is the key to healing racism. We each have the responsibility to do this inner work.

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