Democrats should stop their endless worrying about how to get working-class white people to vote for them and start talking about a bigger problem: the “near-apartheid state of the Democratic Party,” as Steve Phillips describes it.

Whoa, Steve, I told him when we chatted the other day. White people — at least progressive ones — are going to freak out when you drop the word “apartheid.” Phillips, a San Francisco civil rights attorney, leader of a new campaign and media platform called Democracy in Color, and author of the best-selling “Brown Is the New White,” smiled.

“That’s kind of why I started using the word,” he said.

Let’s do the apartheid math with Phillips. Roughly 46 percent of Democratic voters are people of color. Yet with the exception of Rep. Ben Ray Luján, the New Mexico Democrat who leads the party campaign arm for House candidates, nearly every top leader of the party-related institutions and outside groups that controlled $1.5 billion in political spending this cycle is white. That roster includes the leaders of outside groups like Priorities USA and Next Generation, led by San Franciscan Tom Steyer.

While the outgoing chair of the Democratic National Committee, Donna Brazile, is African American, she was a last-minute emergency replacement in July for a white woman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who resigned after a WikiLeaks email leak that showed the party favored Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the presidential primaries.

The Democratic Party’s future leadership looks just as white as both the top Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, and House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.

Why race matters: because Democrats left a lot of black and brown votes on the table in November. Clinton’s share of African American votes was five percentage points lower than that of President Obama in 2012 — a difference that could have helped in longtime blue states like Wisconsin, which she lost by 22,748 votes.

And while Phillips acknowledged that the leaders of party organizations are good people, many don’t have the cultural literacy to connect with people of color. They don’t travel in the same social circles.

The future needs to be different, so here’s how to change things:

In February, there will be a high-profile election for the next DNC chair, and two high-profile people of color — Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who was to announce his candidacy Thursday — are running.

Phillips, through Democracy in Color, will be involved in that race but he’s also digging deeper. He’s been pushing Democrats to hire people of color as the executive directors of their top campaign organizations.

No, this isn’t sexy stuff. It’s the sort of the low-profile hire that’s usually left to insiders — and that’s the problem. Executive directors hire the bulk of the staff, preferably a staff with the cultural competence to connect with what America is going to look like in the future. Already, there has been some success: Last week, Luján hired Dan Sena to be executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the first Latino to serve in that position.

In business terms, this is a growth opportunity — the growth opportunity — for the party. Every day, 7,000 people of color are added to the population, compared with 1,000 whites. A majority of eligible voters in Texas will be people of color in two years. In 2022, the same will happen in Arizona. Spending an inordinate amount of time chasing white votes is fighting the last war.

Maybe if more people of color run the day-to-day operations of party institutions, Democrats will devote more resources to grassroots outreach and fewer to expensive TV commercials. Nothing says “out of touch” like political commercials to a generation that doesn’t watch TV.

Phillips fumed that when Democrats tried to win Arizona this year, their plan was to spent $2 million on TV advertising. Clinton lost the state by fewer than 90,000 votes — while 900,000 Latinos there didn’t vote. That $2 million, Phillips said, could have paid for thousands of organizers who could have brought 200,000 Latino voters to the polls.

“All this money gets spent (by the party), and there’s never a report,” Phillips said. After the Republicans lost the White House in 2012, it produced a 102-page “autopsy” called the Growth & Opportunity Project. It was a tough look at what Republicans needed to do to win back the presidency — like reach out to people of color, women and young voters. OK, so Donald Trump ignored all those suggestions and still won, but at least the party’s attempt at introspection was there.

When Democrats lost the midterms in 2014, the DNC cranked out a similar autopsy. It was 19 pages and about as hard-hitting as a Christmas card.

Maybe the party should hire Phillips to rip open its political guts. In 2014, he audited what the DNC spent on outside consultants and found and found that 97 percent of the spending went to political firms led by whites.

“People tend to hire people who are like themselves,” he said.

One person on Phillips’ short list to be a party chair is an Oakland resident: Addisu Demissie, who was the campaign manager for New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s successful campaign.

Phillips says it is important to remember that even though Trump won the Electoral College tally, Clinton won 2.8 million more votes. That, Phillips recently wrote on Medium, shows that “there is clearly a majority for Democrats to attract without having to resort to Trump-like tactics of coddling the racial resentment of some white voters.”

Instead, they could embrace the future.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli