The antidote to systemic racism: Spiritual oneness

My first real breakthrough in understanding how Blacks have experienced racism historically and continue to do so today came from a family friend. Her great-grandfather’s experiences as a slave and her own dealings with racism in work, church, and social environments were appalling, but they also revealed her inner strength and spiritual power, which left a deep and lasting impression on me. She shared how she prayed and overcame such unjust circumstances with the assurance of God’s omnipotence and her conviction of everyone’s oneness with God and with all of God’s spiritual creation.  

I live in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, where George Floyd was so tragically killed on May 25, 2020. When videos of his death first surfaced, the spiritual strength of my friend came to my thought with an urgent desire to pray as she did, leaning on the healing ideas of Christian Science, as revealed in the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. I realized racism is a form of hatred—hatred stirred up by deeper currents of thought that have been unchallenged and left festering. If our prayers are sincere in their efforts to eradicate this blight, we need to radically counter those ingrained currents with spiritual truth in order to effect lasting change.

So how can we counter the evil expressed in the systemic racism that still polarizes many of our institutions and social interactions? The Bible gives a good starting point: “Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10). Christ Jesus’ teachings resound with an unequivocal “Yes!” to these questions. Jesus taught that we belong to God and to one another under “one Father, even God” (John 8:41), divine Mind, the only cause of all that really is. This is the reality, or truth of being, and every time we yield to the consciousness of this reality, it destroys a little more divisiveness, complacency, callousness, and hatred. This truth of being “is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system. . . . and it restores the harmony of man,” as it says in Eddy’s primary work on Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 423).