How my Childhood Revealed the Illusion of Race

Before Race Had a Name—Early Innocence

When I look back on my childhood, I realize race wasn’t something I understood. At least not in the way adults mean it. I was surrounded by people from every background because my father was in the military. Our first babysitter was a Hispanic woman we will call Ms. Diana for the sake of privacy. Anyways, I never saw her or her kids as anything but people I loved being around. Even when domestic issues unfolded upstairs, I didn’t connect chaos to culture or color. I just saw human beings.

I had white friends, too. In the late ’80s, neighborhood gatherings and birthday parties were normal, and nothing about skin color crossed my mind. But slowly, subtle shifts happened.

The First Subtle Lessons—Bias Through Environment

I remember assuming a handheld game device belonged to a white kid. I remember not wanting to drink from the water fountain after a Black kid, even though I had no issue sharing food or drinks with my own Black family.

That bias wasn’t rooted in hate; it was peer influence and environment, what was seen on TV, the "bad" movies with gun violence like "Boys in the Hood", Rap lyrics, not belief.

I began to see Black kids were often the ones getting in trouble at school, while the apartment complex next to ours seemed full of police activity, loud music, and the things my parents activly me and my brothers to avoid.

Without realizing it, I started trying hard not to be associated with “the bad Black kids,” even if I got along with them.

A Diverse Childhood—And the First Cracks in Stereotypes

Despite those subconscious biases, I was surrounded by diversity:

• Native American friends

• Latino classmates

• Black and brown teachers

• Military kids from everywhere

I played with anyone who wanted to play. Race still wasn’t fully formed in my mind; I was just a kid trying to understand my place in the world.

New Orleans—The Shift That Changed Everything

Moving to the New Orleans area started breaking down my internal assumptions fast. At my new school, kids of all races got in trouble, not just Black kids. Some white kids were rougher than anyone I’d met before.

For the first time, I learned a massive truth:

**Behavior is not racial.

Behavior is environmental.**

By 3rd grade, stereotypes were already being undone.

Life on Base—The Best of Childhood, The Hardest of Lessons

Then we moved onto a military base in New Orleans. It was paradise for a 90s kid:

• full basketball courts

• bikes everywhere

• massive groups of kids

• pools, parks, and youth centers

• daily games of football, baseball, street hockey, and wall ball

It was diverse. Unified. Beautiful.

But the off-base school was a different world—a strict, predominantly Black school with a rough reputation. I remember begging my mom not to send me there. But going to that school became the most transformative experience of my childhood.

Because suddenly…

All the “good kids” and all the “bad kids” looked just like me.

I realized the flaw in my thinking. I realized I had been judging without understanding. I realized culture and environment shape people far more than skin color ever will.

Seeing Humanity Up Close

At that school, I saw Black kids who were smart, kind, polite, and disciplined and others who struggled, acted out, or faced hardships. As a good honor roll kid who originally was so afraid to go to that school sudddendly did things I wasn’t supposed to do too. I got detention. I got suspended. I cursed more freely. The environment shaped all of us.

I saw addiction, struggle, family issues, and raw human emotion for the first time. None of it had anything to do with color.

By 6th grade, my understanding of race was being dismantled faster than most adults ever allow for themselves. I am glad I had that realization so early and why I believe to this day, exposure to diversity is key.

Asking the Bigger Question: “Why Are People Racist?”

As I grew older, my childhood experiences made me ask a deeper question:

How did racism even become a thing?

Why did humans decide skin color determines value, behavior, or worth?

The only explanation that ever made sense was this:

Racism is rooted in ownership, fear, and territory.

People fear losing their space. Fear of losing their way of life. Fear of being overtaken. Fear what they don’t understand.

Imagine being a pack Dogs and suddenly a group of cats come in and start moving into the territory. The dogs are naturally going to have an issue with it. They may allow it, but they will try to maintian a social heiracy. So with humantiy, add visible differences like skin color, and the ego picks the easiest target. Racism becomes the fastest, laziest form of categorization.

Humanity Is Interchangeable—The Ultimate Proof

Despite everything society believes, humans are interchangeable in every way that actually matters:

We can donate blood and organs. We can carry each other’s children. We can create families across any ethnicity. If humans lived on Mars for generations, someone from

Earth could still reproduce with them.

Science. Biology. Spirit. Soul.

Nothing about humanity is limited by race, except the stories we tell.

Racism Set Humanity Back Centuries

As I grew older and looked deeper into how racism shaped society, I realized something important: racism didn’t just come from personal hatred. It came from stories and beliefs passed down as “truth” about how humanity was supposed to function.

One of the most influential stories was tied to Charles Darwin’s early work and the way society interpreted it.

Most people learned a simplified version of evolution:

**“Survival of the fittest.”

“The strong survive. The weak die.” **

This idea blended perfectly with the worldview of Victorian England, which was and is known to be a world built on hierarchy, empire, and racial classification. So when Darwin introduced natural selection, society quickly used it as a scientific justification for inequality.

But here’s the nuance: Darwin never intended his ideas to justify racism or the devaluing of human life. And by looking at his later work, especially The Descent of Man, it becomes clear his view of humanity was much more complex and far more compassionate.

In that book, Darwin wrote that humans evolved moral instincts such as

• sympathy

• cooperation

• mutual aid

• care for the vulnerable

He believed these traits were essential to human survival. Darwin even argued that “sympathy,” what we would now call empathy or compassion, was one of humanity’s strongest evolutionary tools.

This is the part of Darwin that history rarely teaches.

The problem wasn’t Darwin; it was the way the world chose to interpret him.

Leaders, theorists, and political systems took the most competitive, aggressive reading of Darwin’s early ideas and built entire social structures around them. This became the foundation for:

• racial hierarchy

• colonization

• segregation

• eugenics—the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable...

• class division

• the idea that some humans were “more evolved” than others

These interpretations had less to do with biological truth and more to do with cultural ideology.

Darwin did not erase natural selection from his thinking, but he also believed humans evolved beyond pure competition. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that societies prosper when people care for those who are weaker or suffering, even when such actions don’t offer immediate survival benefits.

This aligns closely with what thinkers like Gregg Braden teach today: that humans are biologically wired for connection, not domination; for cooperation, not conflict. Modern research supports this: our nervous systems sync during empathy, our hearts communicate energetic signals, and communities thrive when compassion leads.

Here is a link to how this all works using heart-brain coherence: https://youtu.be/QFqsY-DT6rg

So when I say racism set humanity back centuries, I mean this:

Racism grew from a misunderstanding of science, a misuse of theory, and a cultural story that emphasized division instead of unity.

The truth supported by Darwin’s deeper work, by modern science, and by spiritual understanding is that humanity was never meant to fracture itself into races or hierarchies.

**We were designed to evolve together.

To uplift each other. To heal through compassion.**

And the more we return to cooperation instead of competition, the closer we get to the humanity Darwin ultimately recognized and the humanity Gregg Braden reminds us we are capable of becoming.

The Truth Beneath It All

Race is not real in the spiritual sense.

Race is a misunderstanding. Love is the truth. Unity is the origin.

The sooner humanity remembers that, the sooner we evolve into what we were always meant to be.

But there’s more beneath the surface of that truth.

I’ve seen how people can align religion with race, how a religious identity can be tied to a group, a skin-tone, a heritage, or a social structure. And in many cases, that alignment becomes a tool of control and division even if the original spiritual intent was higher.

If a group of people comes together and truly believes in something when their hearts, minds, and souls resonate with shared intention; extraordinary miracles, healing, and growth can flow naturally. That’s human connection at its highest vibration. But when religion gets tangled with race, when spiritual identity is merged with inherited prejudice and social bias, the potential for unity becomes diluted.

Seen one way, a book published between 1842–1843 called The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (by Charles Colcock Jones) might appear to be an act of cooperation an effort to teach, to guide, to uplift. But from another perspective, depending on how it’s used, it could feel like control morality framed through dominance and spiritual instruction bound to social hierarchy. I can’t speak to the book’s full history (I haven’t read it yet), but the dual nature of such efforts shows exactly why disentangling race and religion or race and spirituality is crucial.

When religion and race merge under ego, social pressure, or inherited prejudice, the purity of spiritual intention becomes blocked by animosity, fear, and separation. The very power of coherence group alignment, shared energy, collective healing becomes contaminated by division.

But when individuals come together as souls not bounded by race, heritage, or arbitrary categorization and align from love, empathy, and shared spiritual truth, then we tap into real unity. We activate the original purpose of spiritual community:

Which is to not control, but to awaken. Not to divide, but to unite. Not to enforce, but to heal and uplift.

Race, religion, nationality these are temporary labels. The spirit inside is eternal.Once humanity truly remembers that, we can begin to reclaim the sacred bond that ties us all.