Racism: About Low Self-Esteem

Racism: About Low Self-Esteem

This article discusses the underlying causes of racism and violence, rooted in fear, insecurity, and low self-esteem. Racism is healed when individuals practice Inner Bonding and heal the woundedness that leads to anger, self-judgment and judgment of others. When we discover the beauty of our own true self, we can then see the God self within each individual.

Those of you who have worked with your wounded self know that one of the characteristics we often suffer from when we are in a wounded self state is that we feel either one-up or one-down. Because the wounded self is based on the core shame beliefs that we are inadequate, flawed, defective, unimportant, and so on, we feel deeply one-down to others. Often, to compensate for these difficult feelings and protect against feeling them, we deny them and instead move into the opposite position: I am better than others.

This position can take many forms:

Racism comes into the picture when the false beliefs about being one-up extend to race and religion:

* I am better than Blacks, Asians and Latinos because I am White, or, as is rapidly becoming the case, I am better than Whites because I am Black, Asian, or Latino.

All of these false beliefs stem from fear, and a deep desire to have control over not feeling the fear. Hate and resulting violence are always protections against feeling the fear of believing, in a deep, unconscious place within the wounded self, that one is unworthy.

To me racists are waving a large flag that says: "I feel deeply inadequate, insecure, fearful, flawed. I am terrified of anyone knowing about these feelings, so I will hide them by pretending to be better than others. This will protect me from ever having to feel how defective I really feel."