‘Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?’

Steve Phillips, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?: Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America, 2026, 288 pp. The New Press. $15.17 (hardcover)

Steve Phillips is a black lawyer who founded Democracy in Color and PowerPAC. He is also a best-selling New York Times author. His latest book is Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, which proposes two explanations for why heterosexual white men are overrepresented in positions of power and influence in the United States.

(A) White men are smarter, more talented, and better than everybody else, and our society is largely meritocratic.

(B) It’s the outcome of structures designed to maintain white male dominance. The nation was founded on racism, sexism, and discrimination, and that pattern continues, largely unabated.

Mr. Phillips dismisses the first answer as “laughable,” but I suspect both are true. On average, whites are smarter than most non-whites. And like all people, whites set up their society for their own benefit, although in recent decades this preference has eroded and in some cases reversed.

Mr. Phillips thinks whites are uniquely evil; their success is based on exploiting blacks and other non-whites, who therefore deserve reparations. He does not acknowledge that Western Civilization gave non-whites much better lives than they would have enjoyed if they had been left alone.

Chapter 1: The SWAMP Framework

Mr. Phillips refers to Straight White American Male Preference as “SWAMP.” He wants “SWAMP audits” for every aspect of American life, to measure the degree of overrepresentation by straight white men. He believes mediocre white men hold almost all the positions of power and influence, thus holding back black geniuses and other talented non-whites.

Heterosexual dominance: An estimated 3-4 percent of American adults are homosexual. Discrimination against them has now, in some cases, become pro-homosexual discrimination. However, heterosexuals would naturally still hold most positions of power because they are 96 percent of the population.

White dominance: Enterprising and industrious white pioneers built a society from scratch, displacing the Indians who were living in the Stone Age. Because white people built the entire society, albeit with some non-whites contributing labor under white supervision, not surprisingly most of the leadership is still white.

Intelligence is a highly heritable and easily measured psychological trait. Since psychologists began measuring intelligence, one of the most enduring findings is that white Americans have an average IQ of 100 while black Americans have an average IQ of 85. White men have excelled in many fields because they are smarter and more industrious than most other groups.

The Bell Curve and subsequent studies show that if we control for IQ, black and Hispanic Americans are overrepresented in high-status jobs. Because of policies such as affirmative action, intelligent blacks have higher socioeconomic status than whites of the same IQ levels. To the extent that any bias against blacks remains, this probably results from a well-justified fear of black criminals and an accurate perception that on average, blacks have lower intelligence and are less reliable.

White parents, who typically have relatively high IQs and below-replacement fertility, have fewer children than blacks and Hispanics, and give greater care to child-rearing. Whites and East Asians also have a longer “time preference” (future orientation). In particular, blacks are less likely to sacrifice in the present to gain future benefits, and are less likely to anticipate the likely consequences of their actions.

As a broad generalization, the more intelligent races place a higher value on frugality and delayed gratification, while the less intelligent races are more impulsive and shortsighted. This difference is clear in savings rates and financial decisions, which lead to racial disparities in intergenerational accumulation of wealth. Some Eastern Europeans appear to be more shortsighted than Western Europeans, despite the two groups having about equal intelligence.

These facts help explain white achievement.

American dominance: It is only natural that Americans hold most positions, at all levels, in the United States. However, American workers now compete in a global marketplace, with employers often bringing in foreign workers as cheap labor. Some relatively well-paid sectors are now dominated by immigrants, such as Indians in computer programming.

Male dominance: Why do men dominate in leadership? This is hardly unique to the United States; men dominate in all societies. During the “Ice Ages,” European men banded together to hunt while women cared for children. These sex roles were part of a traditional family structure that persisted for millennia. Men dominated outside the home and in collective decision-making, while women ruled the domestic sphere. Until the 1970s, this did deny some talented women the opportunity fully to participate in public life. However, the traditional consensus was that structuring the economy to strengthen nuclear families provided advantages to the entire society that justified limiting the professional activities of women.

White men have an average IQ about 4.5 points higher than that of white women. Also, the male IQ distribution is more variable than that of women. Consequently, men account for 70 to 80 percent of whites with IQs of 145 or greater. This, combined with higher male levels of aggressiveness and ambition, contributes to high male achievement.

Chapter 2: State and Local Governments

Mr. Phillips describes many ways in which whites set up governments to reflect their values and serve their communities. For example, Oregon’s original state constitution prohibited blacks and Chinese from being state citizens, and prohibited blacks from moving into the state, although black residents were grandfathered in. Oregon also limited the rights of blacks and Chinese to make contracts, file lawsuits, and own land.

Mr. Phillips never explains what is wrong with whites setting up societies for their own benefit. Haiti and Liberia limit citizenship to black people. Many countries have ethnic restrictions. Before legal reforms in 2008, Thailand limited citizenship to the Siamese people, as well as the Malay and the Lanna peoples whom the Siamese conquered in previous centuries. Approximately 500,000 illegal aliens of Burmese and Hill Tribe descent, as well as some Chinese, have lived in Thailand for generations but were denied citizenship because they were not Thai. Only in 2024 was a process begun to award some of these people legal residency or citizenship.

Mr. Phillips neglected to mention that blacks often drive others out of their neighborhoods through violence and vulgar behavior.

Chapter 3: Federal Government

Mr. Phillips emphasizes that Thomas Jefferson included the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. Noting that Jefferson did want to abolish slavery, Mr. Phillips cited an 18th-century critic who believed it was hypocritical for a slave-owner to use this phrase.

First, Jefferson obviously did not mean that even any two men are literally equal. “All men are created equal” is a variation on anti-royalist slogans dating at least as far back as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. This phrase was intended to repudiate hereditary political power by the monarch and nobility. Jefferson was making the Enlightenment argument that because there are no inherent or hereditary rulers or ruled, the American colonies had the right to self-determination. No founders believed that the races were equivalent.

As for slavery, broad changes in social policy can be implemented successfully only by sustained efforts on a group level. Slavery had been practiced since time immemorial on every major continent. Quakers and Enlightenment-era English and French philosophers were the first modern people to conceive that slavery is wrong. Abolishing this deeply entrenched institution took decades. During the transition from ideal to practice, some inconsistency between behavior and stated goal cannot be called hypocrisy.

Chapter 4: Higher Education

Mr. Phillips decries whites who prefer to live, work, and study among their own kind. Yet he fondly recalls that when he was a student at Stanford University, “I quickly gravitated to Afro-American Studies courses, Black faculty and staff, the Black-themed dorm, and the Black Community Services Center (the Black House).” He writes:

At Stanford, a seminal event took place in 1968 — days after Dr. King’s assassination — at a symposium on white racism in America featuring a panel of all white men. While then-provost Richard Lyman spoke to the two thousand assembled students, faculty, and staff in Memorial Auditorium, seventy members of the Black Student Union walked onstage, took the microphone from Lyman, and issued a set of ten demands that provided the template and framework for student activism at Stanford for decades to come. Among the demands were “proportional representation” in admission for Black, Mexican American, Native American, and other minority students; an immediate plan to “actively recruit minority faculty and introduce curriculum relevant to minority students”; and financial aid reform.

Mr. Phillips admires this disruption, which successfully bullied Stanford into agreeing to most of the demands, and this encouraged him and other blacks to call for more concessions.

This incident was in the early phase of egalitarian ideological repression that ended up seriously eroding academic freedom at almost all colleges in English-speaking nations and in Western Europe. Stanford and other universities began admitting non-white students and faculty who would not have qualified on merit.

According to Mr. Phillips, white men were able to found computer companies in the 1960s and 70s because they attended predominantly white colleges that gave them the knowledge to use digital technology. He thinks racism excluded non-whites from the formal education that would have enabled them to unleash their “black genius” and start tech companies.

In fact, some of the most important tech pioneers were college dropouts:

• Bill Gates and Paul Allen, founders of Microsoft
• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple
• Larry Ellison, cofounder and CEO of Oracle
• Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell

Steve Jobs was half Arab and half European. Mr. Ellison and Mr. Dell are of Eastern European Jewish ancestry. Mr. Wozniak is half Polish and half German.

Chapter 5: K–12 Education

Mr. Phillips notes that most American schoolchildren are now non-white, and he wants schools to use an “emancipation curriculum” to promote racial equity. He mentions the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended school segregation. He does not explore why many whites resisted integration. No white parent wants his children beaten up by black classmates, nor do whites want teachers wasting time on remedial instruction for slow-learning blacks.

Chapter 6: Philanthropy

Mr. Phillips complains that only a small portion of philanthropy goes to non-profits explicitly devoted to promoting racial equity. This may be true, but a much larger part of philanthropy is directed to general social-justice charities that transfer billions of dollars and many opportunities from whites to the other groups, especially blacks. Almost no philanthropy goes to any of the few explicitly pro-white causes that accept donations. Colleges refuse to accept endowments from people who want to set up scholarships for white students, although every other ethnicity has race-specific scholarships — though under Trump, the most blatant of these are being ended. There is probably no philanthropic program anywhere in the world specifically to help poor whites.

Chapter 7: Corporate America

Mr. Phillips believes that black Americans have been cheated for so long that they deserve reparations, and banks should:

• Cancel their consumer debt
• Eliminate bank fees
• Offer interest-free mortgages
• Lend interest-free to black businesses

Mr. Phillips cites a McKinsey 2020 study called Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters, to claim that companies with diverse managers are more profitable. However, even the study’s authors emphasized that many confounding variables limit the credibility of this claim. In real life, race and even sex diversity stifle free exchange of ideas because everyone fears being punished for remarks that might offend someone. Even outside the workplace, speaking honestly about controversial subjects can lead to expulsion from school or church, loss of a job or friends, or shunning by family members.

Chapter 8: Media and Journalism

Mr. Phillips writes, “Throughout most of U.S. history, nearly all of our media’s positions of power and influence have been filled by straight white American men.” The implication is that there should be equal representation for everyone. Does that go for Jews as well, who are overrepresented in media?

Chapter 9: Arts and Culture

Mr. Phillips complains that there are too many heterosexual white men in the arts. It may be true that the managers, technicians, and behind-the-scenes organizers are primarily white men, but it’s hard to believe they are overrepresented in public-facing roles.

Homosexuals have long been overrepresented in theater, cinema, visual arts, and there have been countless female models, musicians, actresses, and entertainers. These days, ethnic offerings in music, art, and festivals often get preference and funding over traditional white culture. Blacks are vastly overrepresented in advertising imagery, acting roles, entertainment, and other public-facing positions.

It’s not just a matter of numbers. Advertising and media often give authoritative roles to blacks who teach or manage bumbling whites who play subservient roles. Even in radio ads, black and female voices instruct white men.

A rare exception to the authoritative black voice is radio advertisements by Optima Tax Relief. Happy customers — black voices and black grammar — explain that Optima saved them thousands of dollars

In the United States and Europe, commercial advertising frequently depicts black men with white women. White men are often shown with Asian or Hispanic women, or sometimes with a non-white same-sex partner. White couples have practically disappeared, and advertising often includes mixed-race children. These messages suggest that mixed marriages are normal and desirable.

This poster advertises a gay nightclub where a “Black-Santa Daddy” will spank away your white guilt.

For many years, but especially since the death of George Floyd, stock photographs or graphics depicting human figures have been non-white and disproportionately black.

Substitution of non-whites for whites in movie versions of historical dramas is routine, almost obligatory — to the point that it is scandalous if a traditionally white drama is cast with only white actors.

In a total inversion of reality, whites are vastly overrepresented as criminals. At my subway station, blacks routinely jump the turnstiles, but the image that warns against this is of a white man. Another version shows a non-white female station agent issuing a ticket to a white fare beater.

Museums and art galleries rarely promote new artists who are heterosexual white men. They far prefer the “emerging black genius.” Many museums post a “context panel” beside older paintings by white artists. For example, the de Young Museum in San Francisco has a plaque beside Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington explaining that he was an “enslaver.” This same museum exhibits Meso-American antiquities without mentioning human sacrifice, African art with no mention of slavery or human sacrifice, and sculptures from the New Guinea Highlands without describing headhunting or the practice of separating young boys from their mothers and making them fellate men so as to ingest “male milk,” considered essential for growth and masculinity.

At the time impressive bronze statues of white men were being torn down in San Francisco, the San Francisco Public Library’s main Civic Center branch displayed this large picture of a black fist punching a white man’s head. This was part of The Black Aesthetic exhibit from February 1 through March 15, 2020.

Chapter 10: And Justice for All?

Mr. Phillips claims police and prisons exist mainly to oppress non-whites. Oddly, there were police and prisons in every state, even when the country was 90 percent white. Nevertheless, Mr. Phillips is right to note that there are more police and jails in non-white areas, but that is due to higher crime rates. In some years, black women have higher murder rates than white men.

Mr. Phillips is correct that we should reduce America’s high incarceration rate. I propose that we confront the moral bankruptcy of black leadership. Black politicians and activists appear primarily to want power and funding. They may not even care about crime because it frightens away non-blacks, thus enabling them to maintain political control of black neighborhoods. However, black Christian ministers supposedly have some sort of moral conscience; their silence is particularly blameworthy. What if blacks did the following:

1. Black preachers should deliver sermons condemning the “snitches get stitches” ethos. They should demand that the FBI build up a reliable witness-protection program so black witnesses and black victims can turn in black criminals to the police without fear of retaliation.
2. Propose “Back to Africa” repatriation to empty American prisons. In exchange for renouncing US citizenship, black criminals would receive a relocation stipend and a one-way ticket to whatever African country would accept them. This form of reparations should be available to any blacks who feel that their inborn nature is incompatible with the demands of American civilization.
3. Black ministers and politicians should insist on government financed black-run eugenics. Responsible and intelligent blacks would oversee sterilizations to reduce the number of unintelligent and sociopathic blacks. Ministers and politicians could promote the message that it is patriotic and Christian for blacks to improve their race. Black celebrities could point out that this would improve the status of black Americans.

These programs would drastically reduce crime, strengthen the economy, and free society from today’s largely non-productive black underclass.

Chapter 11: Democracy

Mr. Phillips advocates that Americans engage in organized political activism to promote multiracial democracy. It is doubtful that multiracial democracy is possible over the long term. Even if individuals of different races get along, racial coalitions develop, and whites are becoming outnumbered. Democracy works best if most of the citizenry is ethnically homogeneous and with a relatively high level of intelligence.

As the number of whites declines, the Democratic Party will devolve into non-white special-interest groups competing with each other. Diversity will not strengthen democracy.

Conclusion

In summary, Steve Phillips’ book is yet another anti-racist rationale for transferring assets to minorities, particularly blacks.

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