The belief that our racist past has been fully dealt with is an illusion that causes America much pain and confusion. It’s time to take a compassionate and critical approach to the theory of race that was widely taught and accepted throughout our history and still lingers today. We can’t have Compassionate Racial Togetherness until and unless we face and admit our history.

Compassionate Racial Togetherness 
Can heal the racial divide
That torments our land.
If we would listen with an open heart
And humbly face the truth,
We could get beyond our past
And America's racial mess.

A zeal for truth reveals
History that’s been concealed
And helps people be healed.

Whatever the source of the racial injustice in our past, it’s time that we openly include that past in our history books. Too much history has been erased (or at least hidden or ignored) and needs to be restored.

Much of the racism in American history has never been fully called out. It’s still there waiting to be faced, healed, and overcome.

We’ll never heal our racial divide if we continue hiding from our history. However, if we let past injustice come to the light, we can then truly heal from it. Reevaluating who we were taught to honor and why we honor them is an important exercise in self-awareness.

We need to learn how to love, respect, and listen to people whose skin looks different than ours. We need to make sure that skin color doesn’t cause us to ignore people, refuse to listen to them, or be unkind to them. Perhaps we should stop being partial to our view of history and race and become a truth-seeker willing to listen to other people’s pain. Somehow we need to begin to listen to each other with compassion instead of accusing and criticizing each other.

Racism can be so subtle that it’s not easy to tell when it’s gone. As humans, we need to make sure that skin color doesn’t cause us to ignore people, refuse to listen to them, or be unkind to them. We need to be critical of anything in our history that was used to justify racism.

Skin color doesn’t divide people into races any more than eye color. Slavery could have easily been based on dye of the eye instead of the color of the skin. We can move beyond our history.