While this is not the place to enter into a full scale discussion about the history of Theosophical organizations or the perversion of ancient symbols and ideas by the nazis and contemporary extreme right wing groups, I can give some salient points to clarify issues a bit. One has to keep in mind that Theosophy is in essence a philosophy of consciousness , not of forms, bodies, etc. She warns explicitly against this in the Secret Doctrine, yet people continue to reify her teachings , take it all literal, etc. Some people quote her out of context, which is the last thing one should do with esoteric teachings because it mostly destroys the meaning of passages and perverts them. Instead of that one should try to connect various passages with each other and let one's intuition work them out.
Study means pondering about things,trying to relate aspects of teachings to each other.
The idea behind the teachings about the root-races is one of development of aspects of consciousness, 'octaves of consciousness' in the spectrum of consciousness. The term 'octaves' refers to the energy-frequency nature of our universe. You have to keep in mind that every individual on earth goes through a process of development of consciousness, in whatever race this individual happens to be incarnated. There maybe individuals who have developed some more octaves of consciousness and there may be some who are just starting to develop, to experience, some octaves that others have already developed. In addition, the process of development of consciousness is cyclic rather than linear and comparing states of consciousness is a tricky thing to do.