Basic human needs:

air water food warmth, rest.
safety/security
love and belonging
esteem

What you are positing is that racism is so powerful because it operates at the level of esteem only. Self aggrandizement at the suffering of others. I would say that's far less pervasive than when something threatens(or is imagined to threaten) on lower, far more limbic-ally dominant tiers: needs for safety and security love and belonging.

I won't burden you with a lot of this here, but if those triggers are impacting people, then we have to figure out how to show them that they are afraid of the wrong things...hell, I'm still all in favor of giving them something else to be afraid of. Something real.

the love and belonging thing is a major hurdle though right? Because these racist communities are their tribes. It's dangerous and unappealing to think of the people around them as wrong or bad. Developing empathy might help them to expand a sense of their tribe to include people of color, and therein almost certainly follows cognitive dissonance. How that is dealt with will probably rely greatly on the balance between what this person has internalized as his or her personal values, and what is safe.

As to esteem itself...well this tier is why the narratives get baked in to justify all behaviors and attitudes...where we make ourselves the good guy and those who we are fearful of, or who we wish to exploit, the bad guys, or even not human at all.
But the reasons we do this span from esteem all the way down the pyramid.