Believe it or not, but white people also pay a price for the racism they hold against people of color. It’s not as obvious and measurable as the damage sustained by people of color, but it’s there.
First, racism shuts down the resources people of color offer. There are dying white communities throughout the country (and the world) in need of a population increase to revive their economies, provide labor and increase the amount of tax money coming in that supports their schools and public services.
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The immigrant populations ready and willing to move into such communities are mostly people of color, which means the prejudice blocking such an influx is definitely self-destructive.
The story of Alabama’s 2011 attempt to get rid of their immigrant population got its own Wikipedia page. It perfectly foreshadowed the problems the U.S. has had since the start of the 2025 crackdowns on immigrants.
You might also have heard that the 2020 U.S. census showed that the U.S. population is growing at its slowest rate since the Great Depression. Slowing population growth can cause economic and labor problems on a huge scale, and it’s not just happening in the U.S. There have been more deaths than births in the European Union for more than 10 years, and some of those countries have only seen population growth because of their immigrant communities.
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It’s a risk to the well-being of our nation for Americans to hold on to their prejudices against immigrants that don’t come from places like Sweden or South Africa (just the whites).
And considering that in the next 20 years, the population of the U.S. will have more people of color than whites, to keep locking up and killing large numbers of people of color will also hurt our national productivity and ability to function in a global economy. As people of color gain the majority, it will become a greater national liability to deny us decent housing, health care, schools, etc.
Then there’s the far less tangible damage racism does to white people. To see certain people as subhuman or unworthy of respect is to undermine one’s own feeling of worth. To see a human being as an animal is to participate in a world of fear where someone else might see you as an animal. It’s a harmful way to see others because it presumes a world of social or racial hierarchies where you might be targeted, too.
A friend once tried to explain to me the psychic pain white people carry. She said it’s caused by the effort it takes to twist your morals and natural sense of right and wrong in a way that allows you to dehumanize others. I didn’t get it at the time. I maintained that whatever pain white people feel doesn’t match the pain of people of color. I still think my assertion is true, but now I can also imagine a psychic or moral toll white people pay for their racism.
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A Brookings commentator asserted in 2018 that the U.S. will become “minority white” by 2045. Today one of every five Americans is Hispanic. In 2023 a Daily Mail article supported the 2045 prediction of when the U.S. population will be a majority of people of color. It’s not hard to understand why so many Americans want to limit the number of immigrants of color and increase the birth rate among white people. They’re afraid of us. They’ve treated us badly and they’re afraid of what will happen to them when we’re in the majority. There’s probably no way to reduce that fear, but if they could understand how racism hurts them, too, maybe there would be some hope for racial peace in our country. Or maybe not.
(For some details on white South Africans becoming the most welcome immigrants to the U.S. listen to the “Winners Welcome” story of This American Life’s podcast of October 31, 2025. It’s a stunning inversion of our immigration policy which has historically helped those who don’t hold the majority of wealth in their countries.)
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