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

We interrogate the popular claim that White racism is collective self-sabotage, asking when, for which subgroups, and over what horizons anti-Black racism (White supremacy) harms White Americans. Through the lens of stratification economics, we first examine “incentive-free” explanations, which imply remedies built on education, empathy, or clinical intervention. We weigh these against incentive-based accounts, in which racism persists because it yields concentrated rents, protects relative status, and secures political advantage even where it lowers aggregate output. We show how aggregate losses can coexist with White subgroup gains in material conditions and relative status, and we discuss intra-White heterogeneity and intertemporal tradeoffs. We then develop tractable microfoundations in which utility depends on relative racial status, building on the economics of other-regarding preferences, and use them to show how the design of reparative reforms shapes their political feasibility. In doing so, the paper illustrates something stratification economics brings to the study of racial hierarchy: it formalizes hierarchy as the predictable product of incentives and converts informal claims about a “psychic wage” of Whiteness into testable predictions about policy support. The self-sabotage thesis thus emerges as a distributive problem, sensitive to salience and to time horizon, that calls for realigning incentives rather than merely correcting psychological, cognitive, or phenomenological errors.