The Matter of White Racism as Self-Sabotage: A Stratification Economics Perspective

We interrogate the popular claim that “white racism is collective self-sabotage” by distinguishing when, for what subgroups, and over what horizons racism [White supremacy] harms white Americans. Using the stratification-economics lens, we first evaluate “incentive-free” explanations–pathology, misinformation, and stigma–that imply remedies centered on education, empathy, or clinical intervention. We then contrast these with incentive-based accounts in which racism endures because it generates concentrated rents, preserves relative status, and sustains political advantage, even in instances where it might generate aggregate inefficiency. We synthesize evidence on talent misallocation, carceral expansion, and housing markets to show how macro losses can coexist with subgroup gains and status wages, clarifying intrawhite heterogeneity and intertemporal trade-offs. We then summarize tractable microfoundations in which utility includes relative racial status concerns, drawing on existing economic literature on other-regarding preferences. We discuss implications for policy, measurement, and future directions for research. Finally, we discuss implications for policy, measurement, and future directions for research. The analysis reframes the self-sabotage of White racism claim as a distributive, salience, and horizon-dependent problem requiring systemic incentive realignment, and not merely the correction of psychological, cognitive, or phenomenological errors.