Yes, clipping certainly will change colors, making them lighter (sometimes desirable), and worse, for example clipping red more than blue can add color cast. That is an issue beyond just the loss of any highlight detail.
However, clipping (modest or sometimes more) can often greatly help many B&W images, increasing contrast, bringing them to life, making them sparkle. Blacker blacks and whiter whites is B&W contrast. It's a standard practice for B&W work. Caution, excessive contrast is not good for most color work.
Some things to know:
One of Ansel Adams basic tenets (in B&W work) is that there should be some degree of pure black and of pure white, for "strength and conviction". His work has few exceptions about that. He did it with darkroom manipulation, but clipping both ends can do it too.
X value is the [0..255] color shade of the tone. All histograms are 256 wide.
Y value is the count of pixels with that tone. It is scaled to be relative count, the maximum height will always nearly reach full scale.
So histogram shows how pixel tones are distributed.
In Photoshop Levels, and in ACR Exposure, holding the Windows ALT key while touching the slider with mouse, will show WHICH PIXELS are being clipped at that setting (to decide if clippings lost detail is important).
Note that (for color images) a one-color gray histogram (called Luminance) is quite different than a three-color three-channel histogram. The single gray histogram cannot show color clipping.
See http://www.scantips.com/lights/histograms.html