Helen Andrews Profile picture
Mar 22 5 tweets 3 min read Read on X
It’s an interesting question: Is anti-racism/critical race theory an American import? Both sides have good arguments but on balance I say yes. America invented this model and then spread it abroad.
Obviously “anti-racism” here doesn’t mean just the idea that racism is bad. It means the specific model of NGOs that (1) use anti-discrimination measures for lawfare; (2) lobby for infinity migrants; and (3) keep watchlists of “far-right” groups that spread “hate,” i.e. dissent from the above, and work with the deep state and other establishment organizations to weaponize those lists.Image
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There were anti-racist groups in France after WWII (MRAP, LICRA) but the first NGO on this model was SOS Racisme, founded in 1984. Below, we see SOS Racisme providing lawyers for African squatters to prevent them from being evicted and also “testing” for bias in landlords, employers, nightclub bouncers.Image
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The U.S. State Department definitely did bring minority activists from France to America to learn our model of anti-racism. The question is, how far back does it go? I talked to one knowledgeable Francophone who said it started under Obama. I’m not so sure. Image
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When I was at TAC, we published a piece by someone who lived in Brazil who mentioned that her black Brazilian friends were constantly being invited by the Ford Foundation to come to the U.S. for fully funded fellowships in anti-racism. This was in the 1990s. Image

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More from @herandrews

Mar 28
The thing about decolonization is, every colony in Africa was unique: the white population was small or large, transient or settled; were schools built; was native labor exploited; etc.

Britain tailored independence plans to each specific case—yet the result was always the same.
All the complexities that were pondered in the run-up to independence—the moral claims of various parties, the colony’s unique history, the economic needs of the future state—collapsed before the simple Fanonist logic of white man bad.

Don’t overthink it, is what I’m saying.
“It’s not communism, and it’s not just
sheer racism. It’s race communism. It’s the merging of the two.”

Good podcast on this topic today, Lomez says some wise things:
Read 5 tweets
Mar 26
“Third Worldism” is a good term and I use it myself, but I prefer other names like “race communism” for two reasons.

1. Its enemy is not just the West but white people explicitly.

2. “Third Worldism” sounds foreign and it’s not. It’s the ideology of the American empire.
The American deep state was the best friend decolonization ever had. The Cold War in Africa was all about us outbidding the Soviets by being more pro-liberation than they were. Image
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It’s true that our Third World clients often paid lip service to colorblind liberalism: We invite white settlers to stay and build the new Kenya! “We shall not steal anything from them except our freedom.” And yet in not a single decolonized country did this multiracial democracy actually materialize. Odd.Image
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Read 5 tweets
Mar 17
The fact that the Penn Station puncher had no previous arrests makes the story more disturbing. He wasn’t a vagrant, just a normal guy who punched a stranger for bumping into him.

“‘Bruh I had a f—ing day … So the n***a I punched died bruh,’ Tate wrote on Instagram Sunday.”
A lady once bumped into my toddler getting off the train. I said, hey, watch it, and she went into a full-on meltdown (“Bitch you don’t know who you’re messing with”), following us around the station for ten minutes shouting. She harassed us on three subsequent occasions at the same stop.

Months later, she even pulled over her car when we were walking down the street in a different neighborhood, shouting at me and my children: “I know where you live now, you better watch out.” She was blocking traffic and other cars were honking, but she kept yelling.

So I have a deranged stalker and my son is afraid of “the bad lady,” all because I told this woman to please not step on my child.

It wasn’t some teen delinquent, either. She was a middle-aged lady with an office job. Her place of employment was on the name badge around her neck.

Public transit is stressful enough without having to worry that you might inadvertently “disrespect” the wrong person.
I have so many stories like this. A teenage boy saw me staring at him as he jumped the faregate, and he started approaching me: “What? What you looking at? Bitch I will throw that stroller in front of the train.” Then a middle-aged lady came to my rescue: “You’re not gonna do it. I’m a mother. I’m telling you, you’re not gonna touch that child.”

I stood there watching these two shouting at each other for several minutes. I got on a train going the wrong direction to escape.

I later saw the same boy jumping the faregate on multiple occasions, usually with the station manager looking on and doing nothing. Why don’t you stop him, I thought.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 10
The ruling ideology is just race communism. Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is its central purpose as much as it was for the Soviets. Who gets board seats, jobs, college spots, loans, housing—it’s all about the allocation of resources by race.
“Wokeness” is a bad name for it because it sounds frivolous. It makes you think of diversity seminars and college professors. “Race communism” sounds like what it is: your telecommunications merger won’t be approved unless you give sufficient hand-outs to legally favored races. Image
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Communists believe the central story of mankind is the oppression and eventual liberation of the working class. Race communists think the same thing but about non-white people. It is the dominant theme of all human history and the basis of the regime’s moral legitimacy.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 20
Interesting New York Times Magazine article on white flight from 1971 by a journalist who grew up in a Slovak neighborhood of Cleveland in the early 1950s and returned after Carl Stokes was elected the city’s first black mayor in 1967. nytimes.com/1971/01/24/arc…Image
“The old ladies of the church were getting beaten and robbed on their way to early mass, so we stopped those… We had a lot of trouble with school children being beaten... I guess you heard about the eighth‐grade girl who was raped by four boys from Audubon.” Image
“Joe had been warned the neighborhood was changing, that five merchants or property owners had been killed during hold ups in the last few years. His response was, ‘Who would want to hurt me? Anyhow, they can take the money, I'll earn more.’ … His tire gauge had deflected a bullet, but his skull had been crushed in a remorseless beating.”Image
Read 6 tweets
Feb 1
“In certain international markets, bad actors have long made concerted efforts to access and share test content.” As Americans get more exposed to Asian cultures of education, we are slowly learning about their downsides. So far we have been slow to adapt. nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/…
As I wrote in Compact: “Meritocracy has within it certain forces that, unchecked, can turn into death spirals. The gaokao is China’s solution to those forces. As our meritocracy comes to resemble Asia’s, we will have to come up with a solution of our own.” compactmag.com/article/how-as…
The boom in Southern colleges is white flight from Asian educational norms. That’s my theory. Image
Read 5 tweets

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