Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: Hello. My name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody. Yesterday, we focused on what one historian called a terrible intimacy—interracial life in the slaveholding South. We did a show with Melvin Patrick Ely, a very distinguished American historian on race and slavery. And we are fast-forwarding a couple of hundred years. We have another book on race, but this one is entitled Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America by my guest Steve Phillips, a longtime activist in racial politics and American politics in general. Steve, welcome to the show. When it comes to racial justice, has anything changed over the last couple of hundred years?

00:01:11 Steve Phillips: No. That's the short answer. Yes, we're not in slavery anymore, and it's important to recognize what it took to end slavery. The country had to go to war, American against American, and the equivalent of what would be seven million people were killed just to be able to say that people should not be held in slavery. So obviously we've moved forward from that, but we still have a yawning racial wealth gap within this country. Most of the positions of power and influence, the quality of life and the conditions, are very racialized, and there's a very significant racial gap. I think we saw this after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when there was pretty widespread acknowledgment that we had systemic ongoing racism within the country and we had to actually tackle it, and we had not yet addressed it.

00:02:03 Andrew Keen: So why, Steve? What's the reason for this?

00:02:09 Steve Phillips: Well, my previous book was called How We Won the Civil War, and that actually started out metaphorically, trying to understand the level of division we have within the country, particularly in the past ten years—how the country's been very divided and that division has become more intense. As I began to look into it, it really became clear that the Confederates never stopped fighting the Civil War. We've had an ongoing intellectual, existential battle within this country over: Is this going to be a white country, or is this going to be a multiracial democracy? And the defenders of the concept of this being a white country—the Confederates and then their ideological and genealogical heirs—have continued to fight for that. We're seeing that play itself out all the way up until the current moment. White fear and insecurity and resentment at equality is a driving force of much of the politics within this country. That is what creates an obstacle and a barrier to really making this country truly equal and just for everybody.

00:03:26 Andrew Keen: Steve, you know as well as I do that a lot of white people will hold up their hands, claim innocence, maybe fairly, maybe not, and say, "I'm not a racist." Or they might hold up their hands and say, "We weren't even in the country; my family wasn't even in the country 200 years ago. We only showed up ten years ago, or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. We're indifferent on this race thing. That was a war 200 years ago. Slavery was an institution that died out almost 200 years ago." How do you respond to claims by most white people, I would guess, of innocence or indifference to what you're saying?

00:04:06 Steve Phillips: Sometimes I try to think of what analogies or metaphors would work, and one I've been playing with is: a biker gang comes into someone's house, takes over the house, takes all the money in the house, and continues to occupy that house, and then passes it on to their children. The children could say, "Well, I didn't do anything." But you inherit a situation that is structurally and fundamentally unequal. The racial wealth gap in this country goes back to the founding of the country and has been perpetuated and exacerbated through public policy. The GI Bill, after World War II, gave billions of dollars essentially to white people and created the white middle class within this country, and in many ways excluded people of color—from access to loans and other wealth-creating endeavors. The average white family has more than ten times as much money and assets as the average black family within this country. So one can say, "I'm not currently perpetuating racism," but you have inherited a situation by which you are significantly materially better off because of the racism of this country. And that's just on that level. When we get to my current book, it's the continuation of preferences for whites that perpetuate this kind of inequality—in terms of who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets funded, who gets invested in.

00:06:18 Andrew Keen: There's obviously currently a reaction by the current administration in terms of regulation, legislation on racial justice, racial rights. Did anything change though from the '60s in your take, in your narrative, Steve, in terms of the differences in economic wealth, power between white and black America, particularly after the various civil rights bills and actions and initiatives of the '60s and '70s and '80s?

00:06:45 Steve Phillips: Yeah, things got better, and there was significant progress—the creation of a black middle class. My own family is a recipient and a beneficiary of that. I grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the suburbs of Cleveland. My family wound up desegregating our street, which was an all-white street at the time. My brother was the first black student at the local elementary school. My parents were concerned that the person who owned the house we bought wouldn't sell it to us because we were a black family, so they got a white civil rights lawyer to buy the house and then deed it over to us. That house, because it was in the suburbs and just a few miles from my grandparents' house, which was more in the city of Cleveland, appreciated in value—it tripled in value and equity. Then my mom was able to access that equity to help pay for me to go to private school, which gave me the opportunities to go on to higher education, to get the kind of education and opportunities I've had. All of that is a reflection of the civil rights movement. The lawyer who helped us get our house originally was part of the whole fair housing rights movement, and we took advantage of the fair housing laws of the 1960s. So it definitely has helped create a larger black middle class and made significant progress from where we were. But that's a different question from: Have we achieved actual equality within the country?

00:08:52 Andrew Keen: Some people might hear your narrative, Steve, and say, "Well, everyone could have been Steve. You started with some disadvantages, you worked very hard, you ended up at Stanford University. In many ways your narrative is rather like my wife's, whose family was from Mississippi. She did the same sort of thing. Are you just an example of the American dream? Not everyone can realize it, but that's the reality of America."

00:09:21 Steve Phillips: Well, there are a couple of different ways to think about that. Looking fundamentally at the question of who holds positions of power and influence—and again, back to this question of the racial wealth gap. My mom was a schoolteacher, and as she explained, the only jobs really available to women overall, but certainly to black women, were as a schoolteacher or a secretary. What does that mean in terms of accumulation of wealth? There's a woman, Rose Sanders, a lawyer in Alabama who had gone to Harvard Law School, and she used to say, "I didn't get into Harvard because I was so smart. If it was just about intelligence, my mom would have gotten in a long time ago." These institutions did not let people of color in. We're here in the Bay Area, and what people don't realize is the structural dimensions of who has access. Computers were at colleges originally. The internet was a creation of being at different colleges. It's no accident that a lot of the original Silicon Valley pioneers were people who had access to computers and the internet because they were in college. But these colleges did not let people of color in. Structurally from the very beginning: who actually has access to those things? So you have all of those situations. And in some ways, myself and probably your wife are, at some level, the lucky ones. Why hasn't everyone had the opportunity to access and attend institutions that are going to be high-quality schools, give rigorous instruction, promote people, and help them unleash their full talents and abilities? When you're trying to figure out if you can find three meals a day, if you can actually cover the rent—those different issues that other families are not facing, the economic challenges from the history of this country—are manifestations of the inequality we face.

00:12:00 Andrew Keen: Your new book is called Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? I guess that would include myself as a white man. But there are lots of poor white men too, aren't there? Especially in America these days, there are growing numbers of poor white men.

00:12:17 Steve Phillips: There are. And that's also an example of looking at some of the structural and economic inequalities within the country. In a lot of ways, people have lifted up and heightened the racial distinction, the racial identity, and fanned the flames of white racial fear and resentment to separate poor whites from poor blacks and other people of color so they don't band together and try to change the system more fundamentally. But what I'm trying to lift up in this book is how the positions of power and influence in this country are held largely by white men. Why is that the case? Really looking at the issues around the preferences that are being shown by default, and in a lot of ways semiconsciously, to hand positions and influence and resources to white men.

00:13:11 Andrew Keen: Before we identify those structures, Steve, I asked you whether there were some benefits to what happened in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. You suggested there were. Has everything gone back to the pre-'60s in terms of the differences in economic wealth and power between white and black America? I don't want to focus on the current administration—we talk about that perhaps a little bit too much—but of course you had the Gingrich reaction in the '90s, you had the Bush presidency, and now you've got Trump. Has everything just gone back, as some people seem to be arguing, to an America of the '50s when it comes to race?

00:14:00 Steve Phillips: Well, that is certainly the current debate within this country. And you can even argue which '50s, with this current administration attacking the 14th Amendment to the Constitution—an 1860s creation—and really trying to undo it in an attempt to make the country whiter. That's a question of which '50s we're actually talking about. I would say there's been a lot of this ongoing battle. In terms of the politics of this country, no Democratic candidate for president has won the majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This undercurrent—or not so undercurrent—of fear and anxiety and resentment has certainly animated Republican politics within this country. This balance and this tension going back and forth has been playing itself out in the '80s and '90s. And now we're at this moment where this current administration has been unrelenting and unapologetic in taking a wrecking ball to all of the programs, institutions, initiatives designed to bring about equality within the country. That's the specific moment we're in now, and that's actually what led me to write this current book.

00:16:07 Andrew Keen: What's your reading of that? Is it the reappearance of overt American racism? Is it white America simply having enough of affirmative action programs? Is it anger, resentment, jealousy? How would you make sense of it?

00:17:17 Steve Phillips: It's some level of all of that. But fear and anxiety about diversity and about the "other"—and the other being people of color—has been part of this country's fabric and psychology since 1619, when black people were brought here. There were laws passed in the 17th century in South Carolina designed to control the behavior of blacks, referring to the rapine nature of slaves. This notion that black people are to be feared and that white people should band together and try to control black people has been part of this country's calculus, its psychology, its politics since the beginning. It's flared up and down over the decades and centuries. Lost to history in the rise of this current president is that when he got into the race in 2015, he was at four percent in the polls. Then he comes down that escalator and does his press conference where he declares that Mexicans are rapists and murderers, and he zoomed to the top of the pack. Fanning the flames of white fear and racial resentment is core to the popularity and support of this current president. That has propelled him to the position of power he is in. And something too many people on the progressive side underestimate is how strong that fear is and how much it does inform political behavior in the country.

00:18:54 Andrew Keen: You mention him coming down that escalator and talking about Mexican rapists and various other tropes. In his mind, and perhaps in the minds of the white Americans that you're critical of, has the Latino community been lumped with black America? Is there any distinction between the two anymore?

00:19:19 Steve Phillips: Well, that's a good question in terms of what the political loyalties and direction among the Latino community are going to be. First, I want to make sure I'm clear. I am obviously a clear critic of racism and preferences for any racial group, including whites and white men. It's also important to acknowledge—and not just acknowledge, but to embrace—that there have always been white people who have been champions of and proponents of this country being a multiracial democracy. Even Thomas Jefferson tried to put a condemnation of slavery into the Declaration of Independence that the slaveholding states made them take out. The abolitionists, the civil rights activists. It's important to acknowledge that sector of the population going forward. It's not a question of people of color versus whites. It's an existential question of: Is this a white country, or is this a multiracial democracy? And there are lots of whites who want it to be a multiracial democracy—not a majority of people, but enough that together they can comprise a majority. Then to the question of where the Latino community is at, that is one of the central fundamental questions in politics in this country right now. On the one hand, you have had the rise of a political movement that is very much tied to demonizing Mexicans in particular, fanning the flames of fear about immigration—we don't talk a lot about concern about immigrants from Canada, but it's the dark-skinned Spanish-speaking Mexicans that is driving a lot of the fear and insecurity. On the other hand, because the time duration of Latinos in the country has been shorter than that of African Americans, there are still a lot of people—including more recent immigrants in particular—who harbor the belief and hope that they can be incorporated into this country, and if you don't rock the boat, they can be part of the mainstream. The political loyalties of the Latino community are very much in play, although the conditions Latinos face would suggest that they would benefit from significant changes to the current status quo.

00:23:06 Andrew Keen: The title of your new book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, is obviously designed to be controversial. What does the title mean?

00:23:28 Steve Phillips: Originally, when I started working on the book, I had a different question and I was going to call it Does All Mean All? I wanted to know what had happened to the commitments after George Floyd was killed. The Declaration of Independence says all are created equal. Abraham Lincoln affirmed in the Gettysburg Address the proposition that all are created equal. And there was broad agreement around that in the months after George Floyd was killed. A lot of programs and initiatives were put forward, then people started to backpedal, and the enthusiasm was lost and the commitment diminished. That was the original focus of this book—what happened to those beliefs. Then you had the 2024 election, and then you had this administration, which has gone after all of these remedies to inequality. It has gone after them with gusto while leaving unaddressed the underlying inequality. That raises a fundamental question: Do we care about the inequality, and what is our analysis? In a country where white men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of the Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of the recipients of venture capital money, and 98 percent of all the money in the country that is managed by money managers is managed by white male money managers—why is that? Is it because they're smarter, or is it because there is preference and inequality and active bias in favor of white men? I wanted to put forward a provocative title in the context of there being so much attack on measures to bring about equality. A lot of people are on the defensive now, trying to defend affirmative action and DEI. Let's reframe this question and go back on the offensive to challenge the underlying inequality.

00:26:40 Andrew Keen: The subtitle of the book is Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America, but the title is about white men rather than white women. And of course, it's the white men who have the power rather than the white women. Why not have the subtitle about not just racial justice, but gender justice?

00:26:55 Steve Phillips: Well, yes, that is part of the issue and the challenge. The opening quote I have in the book is from Anna Tubbs, who wrote the book Patriarchy. She and her husband Michael are good friends. Partly it's just because I'm more of an expert on racial issues than on gender issues, so I'm trying to identify with and connect and lift up the voices who are looking at the sexism part of it as well. But absolutely, it's definitely a gender and racial reality. Every single president in the history of this country has been a man. So what does that say about what our picture of leadership looks like? It's certainly a very male-only and white-male presidency. That's absolutely part of the issue. In terms of my own background and experience, I'm particularly trying to go back on the offensive since we had so much agreement and momentum after George Floyd was murdered. All of these different initiatives and efforts to bring about racial justice—there's been backtracking and diminished enthusiasm. So I'm trying to reignite that energy and those efforts.

00:28:43 Andrew Keen: You mentioned there hadn't been a female president. There has, of course, been a black president—a two-term president. How does that reality fit into your narrative?

00:29:04 Steve Phillips: Well, the first book I wrote, Brown Is the New White, tried to articulate how Obama got elected. I've gone back and actually run the numbers: If Obama had run against Reagan in 1980 or 1984 and had gotten the same percentage of each racial group that he got when he ran in 2008, he would have lost. The country was not diverse enough. The country was 12 percent people of color in 1965; it's 41 percent people of color now. So that diversification of the country and the electorate is what created the conditions for Obama to actually get elected and then reelected. I was trying to illuminate that point because too few people appreciated the importance of it, and the importance of then building capacity and infrastructure and maximizing the power and potential of people of color in the multiracial new American majority. So that is part of the Obama piece. The other reality—and this is the reality of the current occupant of the White House as well—is that this current occupant of the White House has run for office three times: twice against a woman, once against a man. The two times he ran against a woman, he defeated those women. So what lessons do we take from that? There's a lot to grapple with in terms of our conception of leadership and deep-seated, widespread sexism across all of the different racial groups—at least sufficiently so that the level of support the candidates who ran in 2016 and 2024 needed was not accomplished. Although it's important to note for history that Hillary Clinton got three and a half million more votes in that general election. So we need to focus on gender and the manifestations of gender bias, on the psychological models about what leadership looks like. We need to have that conversation, but it's very much missing from the political dialogue.

00:32:30 Andrew Keen: Some people might be watching or listening to this, Steve, and think, "Well, this guy, he's preoccupied with race and gender and every way of looking at it is through that prism. In other words, you have this hammer so everything looks like a nail." And they might say, "Well, Hillary Clinton, Harris, they just weren't very good candidates. I would have voted for one of them if they'd been better, if they'd been different on one policy or another." Do you, in your analysis, in your view of the world, when it comes to politics in particular, do people vote according to their gender, according to their race, according to their class?

00:33:09 Steve Phillips: It's not just according to their gender or class. The writer Isabel Wilkerson has this book Caste, and she talks in there about how we are all on a stage that was set up long before we arrived, and the roles are predetermined. We know who is lead actor, who is the sidekick, who is in the margins. It gets at what our bias is around what leadership looks like and who should actually be in charge. It's not just that people are voting for their own identity or background. If that were in fact the case, then white men wouldn't be as ubiquitous, because they're only 29 percent of the population. But there's a predisposition and a bias toward putting white men in positions of power, giving them investment resources, promoting them, electing them. That's the reality we've been facing. By any objective measure, both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were more qualified—by the way we have discussed qualifications in the history of this country in electing a president—than the person they ran against. So it wasn't that issue.

00:34:46 Andrew Keen: Although that was a pretty low bar, Steve.

00:34:55 Steve Phillips: Well, and yet it turned out the way that it did.

00:34:58 Andrew Keen: You've mentioned George Floyd a couple of times, the Black Lives Matter movement. You said that you're disappointed—or I got the sense you're disappointed, and you articulate that in the new book—that what was promised after Floyd didn't come through. My understanding or my memory of what happened with Floyd had to do with justice, particularly police justice. What in your view is the narrative around Floyd? What did America think or rethink or promise or repromise after the George Floyd incident?

00:35:19 Steve Phillips: So the power of that moment was that there's a very natural—and I would say even human, certainly American—inclination to be in denial and to excuse things away: "Well, that's not really the case," or "People don't really do that." What happened with George Floyd was that you couldn't excuse it. It was so plain to see for the whole world: this man's knee on the neck of this black man until he was killed. You couldn't ignore it anymore. In the face of that, it compelled people to action. It touched something in people across the spectrum, and that extended out to people saying, "No, I've experienced this as well. I've experienced different types of racism, discrimination, and different types of treatment." It was perhaps one of the most—certainly top three—periods in history when there was widespread agreement in our society that systemic racism was a problem and we had to do something about it: Reconstruction, the '60s, and the George Floyd moment. You had a lot of effort and activities and programs and initiatives and momentum. Walmart trumpeted "Black Lives Matter." They created a racial justice center. They committed $100 million to tackle racial justice. Now, apparently they think they've solved it in these past three or four years, because they've scrubbed their website, they've dismantled the racial justice center, there's no more financial commitment to it. But it's that moment—because I've been doing this work for a long time—when there was such widespread acknowledgment and commitment to doing something at some scale, that I'm trying to remind us of, and trying to put back front and center in the national discourse.

00:38:14 Andrew Keen: How would you explain that? You mention Walmart. Some cynical people might argue, "Well, of course Walmart would say that in the wake of Floyd when everyone was outraged." And a few months later everyone conveniently forgets, moves on to the next crisis, and they conveniently scrub the program. What's your explanation, at least in your mind, for the failure of America—and I use that word carefully—to deliver on the promises after Floyd?

00:38:52 Steve Phillips: Well, these things go together, which is why it's important who holds these positions of power. If the people making the decisions and allocating the dollars and charting the course are people who have experienced and continue to experience these issues, they're not going to relent until there is actual progress and actual changes made. But if they're people who don't experience it and they're only responding to the pressure of the moment, then as other things arise their attention is going to change. And that's largely what happened. You also had the political dynamic where there was an actual political movement in opposition to racial justice—and then, surprising to many people, a level of success to that movement, which gave cover to people who weren't all that committed in the first place to racial justice to dismantle and backtrack and not face any consequence for it. So in a lot of ways that's what's transpired over the past five or six years.

00:40:32 Andrew Keen: Do you think that if people understood your version of the narrative, many Americans, and indeed many white Americans, would be like you—disappointed and angry?

00:40:54 Steve Phillips: I think that is in fact the case. The majority of people do want this to be a multiracial democracy. The majority are not supportive of this level of hostility towards DEI, affirmative action, and these types of measures, and in particular they're not supportive of it when they see the underlying problem. That's what happened with the George Floyd situation—it was undeniable, and people went into action. What we're seeing in the past couple of years in terms of politics is that there's been a backlash to this level of division and hostility and hatred emanating from Washington. That's what you're seeing playing out in elections all across the country over the past year to 18 months.

00:42:21 Andrew Keen: We're speaking of course in the spring of 2026 as the Democrats begin to think about presidential candidates. We're speaking a few months before the midterms. You talked about the progressives. Is this book designed for the progressive community? Do you hold any hope, Steve, that the kind of racial justice that you want to see in America can be delivered by the Republicans, a post-Trump Republican party?

00:42:45 Steve Phillips: Well, I won't say none, but very little. We have historically and continually underestimated the political appeal of white racial fear and insecurity and resentment. That level of fear, insecurity, and resentment is what led the Southern states in 1860 to reject the results of an election in which the candidate backed by black people won—and to reject it to the extent that they seceded from the Union and went to war against the country. Then you have the attacks on and distancing from all the Reconstruction rules by the Supreme Court, with successive Supreme Courts trying to narrow the reforms passed through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Then you had Strom Thurmond run as a Democrat originally in 1948 on the segregationist platform. Then George Wallace ran as an unapologetic segregationist in 1968, also as a Democrat. But then there was the shift, and those people who had propelled politics based upon white racial fear and resentment moved to the Republican Party. So the Republican base, its driving force, its rocket fuel, has been white racial fear and resentment. To think that that sector and that movement, which is really all about stopping equality and justice, is somehow where we're going to find our solutions—there's very little empirical evidence that that's the right way to focus. Having said that, I believe the model for what we need to do is to look at what happened with Obamacare. That was a policy that benefits everybody and was made available to everybody regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, regardless of where they are on the economic spectrum. But it didn't depend upon winning over, changing the minds of, and getting the support of Republicans. You had to build the political power to pass public policies that then benefit everybody. That's what I think this moment demands.

00:46:32 Andrew Keen: Steve, again, you know better than I do as a longtime activist that the Democrats themselves are very divided. There are centrist—I'm not sure if that's the right word—certainly centrist Democrats who are very fearful of making racial justice and racial politics central once again in the Democratic Party. And there are those, of course, on the left who will strongly disagree. What would you say to centrists—and they've been arguing it now for many years—who argue that ultimately if Democrats are to win back control certainly of the presidency and of Congress, they need to focus less on racial justice and more on broader non-racial issues?

00:47:12 Steve Phillips: Well, this is why I've had to keep writing these books—to try to explain. I'd say fundamentally the people who hold those views among Democrats are bad at math. They have very little empirical data supporting their belief that somehow you're going to win people over to this view. One of the things I'm proudest of and point to is that I've had a decade-long partnership with Stacey Abrams in Georgia, long before anybody knew who she was or what she was trying to do. She came to me and my late wife Susan and said, "There are a million eligible non-voting people of color in Georgia. I'm going to register them to vote." That was really about inspiring, organizing, showing a path toward justice and equality, and getting people signed up to register to vote. Eight years after that, Georgia's transformed electorate turned out in large numbers and elected the literal successor to Martin Luther King—Raphael Warnock, who preaches from the pulpit where Dr. King preached—from Georgia to the United States Senate, flipped control of the United States Senate with Warnock and Ossoff, and changed the balance of power in the entire country. That's the path forward within this country. That's the path that has empirical evidence, in a country that is getting increasingly racially diverse every single day. Texas is 61 percent people of color. Fifty-one percent of the eligible voters in Texas are people of color. So to fail to heavily prioritize investing in and turning out those voters—who by and large tend to vote more Democratic—is foolhardy.

00:49:59 Andrew Keen: Are there models of politicians, white or black or in-between, who for you are refocusing on racial justice? Mamdani comes up a lot in these conversations. You've mentioned Stacey Abrams from Georgia. Are you finding next-generation public figures in America who are ready—and indeed eager—to readdress racial injustice?

00:50:17 Steve Phillips: Yeah, Mamdani is a great example, and one that does not get enough attention within this country. The irony is that people accused Obama of being a Muslim socialist from Africa, none of which he was, but Mamdani is actually all of that. His unapologetic embrace of multiracial progressive politics inspired the electorate, brought lots of people out, propelled him to victory, and is giving him the political power to advance a public policy agenda that looks at childcare for everybody, a much more fair tax system, and so on. That is a model that should be far more celebrated within progressive and Democratic circles. Stacey Abrams, as I mentioned, was the architect of what transformed Georgia, the defender of people's right to vote through the 2020-2022 elections. And she's been one of the main champions of the importance of multiracial democracy and DEI through her American Pride Rising program. Here in the Bay Area, Lateefah Simon has succeeded Barbara Lee in her seat, which was Ron Dellums' seat before that. Lateefah comes out of the multiracial Bay Area and is a very strong, unapologetic social justice, racial justice person, and in many ways I think she represents the future of politics within this country.

00:52:35 Andrew Keen: What about Newsom? We're both talking in San Francisco, we both live here. He at the moment at least—although probably a poisoned chalice—is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

00:52:51 Steve Phillips: Well, I have the two-sided reality that I've known Gavin Newsom for almost 30 years now. I was on the San Francisco school board in the '90s, so I've known Gavin since then. He has his strengths and his weaknesses. He's been a good critic of Trump and the direction the current president has gone in, yet he has not leveraged his positions of power and influence to support actual racial justice in general, and African Americans in particular. He had said he would make sure that Kamala Harris's Senate seat—there have only been a handful of black women senators in the history of this country—would stay a black woman's seat. And he kind of—too clever by half—danced around that issue by appointing someone temporarily, but not putting his weight behind getting a black woman elected. Similarly, in the Lieutenant Governor's race this year, the three leading Democratic candidates are African American Michael Tubbs, Asian American woman Fiona Ma, and white guy Josh Fryday. Who is Gavin endorsing? The white guy. So in ways that are underneath the radar, he does not actually walk the walk in ways you would want your next president to do.

00:54:46 Andrew Keen: What concrete policies, Steve, do you want to see? I'm assuming you want DEI reimposed. What's your position on reparations?

00:55:03 Steve Phillips: That is the ultimate question we have to grapple with. Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a piece in 2020 in the New York Times titled "What Is Owed." We have a situation where the wealth in this country was created by the labor of black people and on land that was taken both from black people and from Native Americans. So what are the responsibilities to our society for that? If somebody broke into a house and took all of the resources there, then just kept living there and kicked out the other people or put them in the back in the lesser home, what is owed to those people? That's a conversation we can't even pass in this country—even when the Democrats have had control of Congress—a bill to study the question of reparations. Not to give reparations, but just to study, to have that discourse, to have that dialogue. People have put forward different measures. Angela Glover Blackwell at PolicyLink wrote a piece in 2020 after George Floyd about what different corporations could do—what banks could do. Many banks came into existence, and some of the insurance companies: their original profits came from insuring the bodies of black people to work as slaves. People paid that money, and that became the original capital for these insurance companies to get started. So she was saying: why don't banks provide interest-free mortgages to African Americans? There are a number of policies and programs that have been put into the public square, but there hasn't been the will to grapple with them. We do have to ultimately confront this. We have a profound, significant racial wealth gap in this country that was created and maintained intentionally. Are we ever going to have a conversation about that wealth gap in particular, and its manifestations in terms of the quality of life for African American people? So it's a long way of saying that we do have to grapple with what is owed, and we do have to look at ultimately paying reparations, as has been done in this country and in other countries where there has been similar treatment and exploitation of a single group of people.

00:58:03 Andrew Keen: But how would it work, for example, with somebody like yourself? You, as you say, you worked hard, your parents sacrificed, you got lucky, you went to Stanford, you're a very well-dressed, very prosperous black man. Would you get reparations? How would it work?

00:58:34 Steve Phillips: Well, there unfortunately aren't that many of me—let's just start with that. Writ large, roughly a third of black people live in poverty. The numbers who are actually more well-off are not nearly the same as those who are not doing well economically. So writ large, there's that issue. I do worry, and I'm concerned, that we can get too bogged down on the specifics, and the specifics can actually undermine the larger support. I want us to start with the question of what is owed. Does this country owe a commitment to redressing the inequality that was created and that has disadvantaged African Americans? Then you get to the question of how it actually works. Is it checks to particular people? I certainly would not need, would not take, or would donate a check, but that's a separate issue from: should there be public policy focused on the inequalities in the black community? Should we have targeted investment to make more jobs available? Some of those things are ways we can address this question of what is owed. There are creative minds within this country who can come up with those solutions, but we haven't even had the conversation yet. And that's the predicate to being able to determine which specific solution.

01:00:32 Andrew Keen: But in an America of the second half of the 2020s, post-Trump, where there's increasing economic inequality—not just between blacks and whites, but between whites and whites—in an America of lowering living standards, increasing competition with China, do you really think that America broadly is ready for this conversation?

01:01:11 Steve Phillips: Well, the question is: who is America? I think black America is ready for the conversation. There's a similar question that needs to take place for the other communities of color, in terms of Latinos in general and Mexican Americans in particular. As I said, we took the majority of Mexico from Mexico and then created the Southwestern states within this country. The railroads, which were tremendous economic engines of wealth in this country, were largely built by immigrants from Asia. So what is owed to these communities who did the work that generated and created all this wealth? And I'm saying there's a significant, or meaningful, number of whites who themselves see the inequality and want there to be greater justice and equality. So I think all those people are ready for this conversation. You saw this also about a decade ago in the Occupy Wall Street period—this notion about the 99 percent versus the one percent. And that's the ultimate conversation we have to be having. This is the richest country in the history of the world. Why is anybody poor? Why do we not make a commitment to ending poverty? What are our values as a society, as a people, as a community? Do we want people to be sleeping on the street, to be going hungry, not to have good housing? Because we can actually solve all of that if we had the commitment and the determination and the courage to advance solutions in that direction.

01:03:43 Andrew Keen: What about the Asian community? You mentioned the railroads. Especially in the West, they were built by immigrants from Asia. How would your argument work when it comes to Asian Americans, who tend to be much wealthier, I think, than whites, let alone blacks?

01:04:22 Steve Phillips: Well, yes and no. There are different sectors of the Asian community. One of the things people don't realize is that the very first immigration law in this country, in 1790, said that to be a US citizen you had to be a free white person. Stepping way back: the world is a very diverse place—the world is about 85 percent people of color. So for the United States to be 90 percent white in the 1950s was a very intentional and exclusionary set of policies and practices. At the core of that was this law that you had to be white to become a US citizen. That was challenged by a Japanese person in the 1920s, and the Supreme Court said, "No, you can't be a citizen because you're not white." That was the status of this country until the mid-1960s. And I was born in the early 1960s, so it's a fairly recent reality. After some of those laws were changed in the mid-1960s, many of the Asians who came over were of the professional sector. Their economic status was different, and they had more of an economic base to start with, which is why there are somewhat better economic status and statistics. But still less than whites. There's still a racial wealth gap between Asians and whites. There's still a gap in the positions of power within the country, which don't benefit Asians as well—to say nothing of all the different sectors of Asians who work in fields, in housekeeping positions, and other working-class positions. Large numbers of those positions are also held by Asians. So this concept of raising all the boats and all coming up together will benefit Asians significantly as well.

01:08:03 Andrew Keen: Final question, Steve. Do you believe, in the long run, if what you are arguing for in Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? comes to pass, could you imagine a colorblind American society where independent of race everyone is doing about the same as everybody else? And if so, is there a contradiction between that and focusing on racial policy to get there? In other words, if America is ever to be truly colorblind, is the way to get there by focusing on color?

01:08:54 Steve Phillips: Well, I would say two things. One is that people talk about identity politics. I didn't start identity politics. Identity politics was started in 1790 when they passed the law saying that to be a US citizen you had to be white—and when people held black people in slavery because they were black. That's identity politics. Core to the struggle within this country has been this question of: are we going to be a white country or not? So we have to focus on that question and we have to answer that question, and hopefully ultimately answer saying, "No, we're not going to be a white country." So it's racial in that regard. Personally, the metaphor of colorblind is not what I'm trying to evoke. I ran the New York Marathon about a decade ago, and I was struck by the cultural diversity and the embrace of cultural diversity. You had Latino music in one borough, then a black gospel choir in Brooklyn. You had the full racial diversity and spectrum all embraced and celebrated. A quilt—Jesse Jackson used to talk about how America's not like a blanket; it's like many patches, many pieces, many colors, all bound together. It's a beautiful thing. So it's not being blind to the diversity; it's appreciating it, and not only focusing on the white part of it but appreciating it overall.

01:11:30 Andrew Keen: Well, Steve Phillips' new book Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America is out this week. Steve, a real honor and privilege to have you on the show. Best of luck with the book, and best of luck with your struggle for racial justice. Thank you so much.

01:12:06 Steve Phillips: Thanks for having me.

01:12:09 Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening to or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify—all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thanks again.