I really hate to break it to you guys: It's always been like this. Maybe not quite THIS extreme, but a very small group of wealthy white men have run the United States since the beginning.
See, I'm a "white dude" yet I don't find this statement racist in the slightest. It's an objective truth that white males are disproportionately wealthier than any other demographic. It's just like saying Baby Boomers are the wealthiest generation at the expense of GenX and Millenials: fact.
The author never said nor implied that white males are the only rich people in society. Whether or not money inherently makes you out of touch with the rest of society, though, I'll leave for another day...
On the flip side, white guys individually are ALSO seen as the biggest threat to the existing white-guy corporate power structure.
Being either non-white or non-male can be an advantage to a certain point, because the power structure doesn't see you as a threat to "go all the way". Thus it can be easier to rise to a high level, even if the glass ceiling is there just below the top.
You can see the same behavior in other species. The direct threat to a dominant, territorial male is another male of the same type who is encroaching on his territory. They will tolerate or even befriend animals of other species.
For every beachmaster elephant seal with a harem of 20 females, there are 19 other bachelor seals.
The great thing about advancing technology is that our results will depend less and less on being "allowed" to do things by other people.
And what are you comparing? Just dollar amounts? Better to be a middle-class college student now than a king in medieval Europe. Better to be YOUNG than a 93-year-old billionaire. You have more access to source code and opportunity now than the whitest of white people did even 20 years ago. It is very easy to have less worry and to sleep better than these billionaires.
The dollar metric is very misleading. There are Buddhist monks who are far happier than these billionaires. How much more enjoyment can you really get from a billion than 100 million? 10 million? Doesn't it imply a very poor enjoyment function if it requires ENORMOUS resources to enjoy life?
One funny thing about a lot of rock stars and movie stars is that they tend to be miserable. It looks glamorous, but that's an image they are selling. Really it's quite common for them to be complete emotional wrecks.
"Successful" businessmen often live with enormous stress and ill health. If you are driven to keep on accumulating wealth endlessly, odds are you don't even have the psychological capacity to enjoy the fruits of it. There are various mushy real-life examples I could use, but perhaps this is more straightforward: People who play certain online games because they are addicted, and don't enjoy it anymore (EverCrack, WoW, FarmVille, etc.).
White people have certainly never had a monopoly on psychological well-being (Eastern philosophies were already way ahead thousands of years ago) or physical health (the typical Western diet; hackers' physical condition?)
I for one am having a hard time discerning your point, white males or no white males. The point between the lines seems to be that you wish you were getting rich.
The rich white guys you mentioned in this comment are all Jewish, for what it's worth. Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist or a racist here, but trying to pin this on white privilege isn't entirely accurate.
Poor white men arguably have more in common with poor women of other races than they do with rich white CEOs or presidents, but, you know, divide and rule.
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