Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America
Keen On America
Reframing the Debate: Provocative Book Title
Phillips describes choosing a provocative title to force the question: meritocracy or systemic preference for white men?
“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips
Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might think so, but few others are convinced. Especially the Stanford educated Steve Phillips whose new book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? is designed to “play offense” in the fight for American racial justice. The title of Phillips’s new book is, of course, a provocation. White men are 29 percent of the population, he tells us, but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all investment funds managed by money managers. Is that really because they’re smarter than everybody else? Or is it because the system is biased in favor of white dudes who graduated from Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Phillips argues, there was, albeit all-too-briefly, broad agreement that systemic racism existed and needed to be addressed. Then came the 2024 election and the MAGA war against DEI. It’s time to fight back, Phillips says. Rather than defending affirmative action, Phillips says that the question is why, in the richest country in the world, white men hold 90 percent of the power when they are only 29 percent of the population. Until that mathematical inconsistency is explained, there’s no point in pretending that the arc of American history bends toward justice.
Five Takeaways
• 29 Percent of the Population, 90 Percent of the Power: The book’s central data point. White men are 29 percent of the US population. They hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions. They receive 90 percent of venture capital funding. They manage 98 percent of all investment money in the country. Phillips’s argument: you don’t need to allege conscious racism to explain this. You just need to acknowledge that a system shaped by centuries of exclusion doesn’t self-correct. The question the title asks is the question nobody wants to answer: if the system is meritocratic, why do these numbers look like this? Either white men are smarter than everybody else, or the system is not meritocratic.
• Playing Offense: The book began as a study of what happened to the post-George Floyd consensus. The broad agreement that systemic racism existed — widespread in June 2020 — dissolved within months. By 2024, the political momentum had reversed entirely. Phillips’s diagnosis: the left spent the intervening years playing defense — defending DEI, defending affirmative action, defending the language of equity. The result was a retreat. His prescription: stop defending programmes and start prosecuting the inequality. Make the other side explain the numbers. Reframe the question from “should we have DEI?” to “why do white men hold 90 percent of the power?”
• The Biker Gang Analogy: To the objection — common from white Americans — that they personally didn’t create the racial wealth gap: Phillips offers the biker gang. A gang comes into someone’s house, takes all the resources, occupies the house, and passes it on to their children. The children can say: I didn’t do anything. But they inherited a structurally unequal situation. The GI Bill after World War II gave billions of dollars in wealth-building to white Americans while largely excluding people of color. The average white family has more than ten times the assets of the average black family. “I didn’t do it” is not the same as “I don’t benefit from it.”
• The Confederates Never Stopped Fighting: Phillips’s underlying argument: the division in American politics is not left vs. right. It is an existential question that has never been resolved — is this a white country, or is this a multiracial democracy? The Confederates and their ideological heirs never conceded the answer. White fear and resentment at equality is the single most consistent driving force in Republican politics since 1965, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of the white vote since.
• America Can’t Pass a Bill to Study Reparations: The wealth of the United States was created by the labour of enslaved black people and on land taken from Native Americans. Banks and insurance companies trace their original capital to the bodies and labour of enslaved people. The racial wealth gap is the direct structural consequence of that history. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass a bill not to pay reparations, but merely to study the question. Not a single vote to begin the conversation. Until America can have that conversation, it hasn’t begun to confront what is owed.
About the Guest
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and the author of Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, How We Won the Civil War, and Brown Is the New White. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former San Francisco school board president.
References:
• Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America by Steve Phillips.
• Democracy in Color — Phillips’s organisation focused on race and politics.
• Episode 2883: Melvin Patrick Ely on A Terrible Intimacy — the companion episode on interracial life in the slaveholding South that immediately precedes this one.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Chapters:
- (00:30) - Introduction: from slavery to the present — has anything changed?
- (01:11) - The short answer: no. And what it took to end slavery.
- (02:03) - Why the racial wealth gap persists
- (03:26) - The Confederates never stopped f...
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