Universities Taught a Generation to Hate the West

The intellectual trap is simple but effective: professors ask students whether global politics can be understood through a binary of colonizer versus colonized. In one international relations class, every hand went up in agreement—except one. When pressed to explain his dissent, the lone student pointed out the absurdity of reducing complex global realities to a simplistic moral tale, noting that geography, culture, and governance often matter far more than colonial history in determining a nation’s prosperity.

Yet that answer, though grounded in reason, was deeply unpopular. The room had already absorbed the core premise of postcolonial theory without questioning its origins or implications.

Marxism Repackaged for a New Generation

Postcolonial theory emerged in the 1960s alongside critical race theory, borrowing heavily from Marxist thought. The colonizer-versus-colonized framework is essentially a rebranding of Marx’s oppressor-versus-oppressed dichotomy. What began as an academic attempt to examine post-independence societies has morphed into a one-dimensional lens that consistently lands on the same conclusion: blame America, blame Britain.

The theory now argues that dismantling so-called colonial barriers through globalization and multiculturalism is necessary to properly understand the Third World—a position lifted almost directly from Marxist class struggle theory.

The Mamdani Connection

At the center of this intellectual movement sits Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor at Columbia University. More significantly, he is the father of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. This isn’t some obscure academic toiling in obscurity—this is the man who shaped the worldview of the individual now governing America’s largest city.

The Third World academic tradition underpinning this framework is built almost entirely on hostility toward First World life and values. Immerse students long enough in scholarship that casts the West as the villain, and they will inevitably see the West as villainous.

Fanon’s Call for Revolutionary Violence

This ideology isn’t confined to seminar rooms. It has embedded itself across institutions in Australia, Britain, and the United States. Frantz Fanon, one of the movement’s foundational voices, is taught in undergraduate programs at Yale University, Stanford University, Columbia University, and numerous other elite institutions.

Fanon’s teachings are explicit: colonial violence could only be answered with revolutionary violence. Decolonization, in his view, demanded psychological and cultural rupture. Because colonialism was violent, the response must be equally violent—directed specifically at white society. This isn’t gentle academic critique; it’s a blueprint for radical revolution, and American colleges are teaching it as legitimate scholarship.

Mamdani presents a somewhat more moderate version, but his arguments remain radical. He doesn’t merely critique colonialism—he questions the legitimacy of the modern nation-state itself, arguing that its structure of political majorities governing minorities is the very mechanism producing cycles of colonial and postcolonial violence. He challenges the legitimacy of the Founding Fathers and American nationalism, suggesting the United States remains, in effect, a colonized society.

The Fruits of Anti-Western Education

Once the theory being taught is understood, it becomes clear why Generation Z increasingly views their own country as fundamentally illegitimate. Their history isn’t presented in a balanced manner—it’s filtered through a lens of perpetual grievance.

The consequences are already visible in American streets. In Boston, Miami, and Baltimore, statues of Christopher Columbus have been beheaded, defaced with red paint, or thrown into harbors. Statues of Thomas Jefferson in New York City and George Washington in Portland have suffered similar fates.

When you build a worldview around treating your own country as the root cause of global poverty and injustice, you shouldn’t be surprised when people grow to hate not just the country, but everything it represents.

What Postcolonial Theory Conveniently Ignores

What postcolonial theory systematically omits are the two factors that actually generate national prosperity: freedom paired with free markets, and a strong cultural foundation—historically, most successfully, a Judeo-Christian one.

Oxford economist Dambisa Moyo articulates this clearly in her work Edge of Chaos, noting that creating growth requires preserving democratic capitalism’s core strengths—freedom, efficient markets, transparency, and properly constructed incentives—while reforming its weaknesses.

Critical examination of history is healthy and necessary. But postcolonial theory has evolved beyond critique into an ideological weapon designed to instill shame, resentment, and hostility toward Western civilization itself. The question now is whether institutions will continue enabling this intellectual corruption or whether they will return to teaching history with honesty, nuance, and balance.

With information from Washington Examiner