America cannot afford to continue to pay the sociopsychological, sociopolitical, and economic costs of racism. The economic and psychosocial benefits of racism to the majority population during the slavery era are obvious. Similar interests motivated the discriminatory treatment of African Americans during the Jim Crow period, when Whites still believed that excluding African Americans from full social, economic, and political participation and exploiting them for economic gain was part of the natural order. Since the 1954 Supreme Court decsision, "Brown v. Board of Education," White Americans have continued to enjoy material and psychosocial advantages based on past racially exclusionary practices and present institutionalized discrimination. However, this long history of racism has created social costs in terms of social instability, loss of economic productivity, and constraints on the United States' world role as a purveyor of democracy. African Americans bear the individual costs of low self-esteem, high unemployment, low socioeconomic status, and limited opportunities. White Americans bear the costs of ignorance, moral ambivalence, interracial tension, and a weakened labor force. Statistical data are presented in eight tables. A figure illustrating the reciprocal relationships among the sociopsychological, sociopolitical, and economic costs of racism is included. A list of 98 references is appended. (FMW)