page_title: The White Man's Burden
section_title: Responses
hierarchical_section_title: The White Man's Burden / Responses
context_page_description: “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands”, by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War, which exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country. Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre “Recessional”, also a Kipling poem about empire.
  In “The White Man’s Burden”, Kipling encouraged American colonisation and annexation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American War. As a poet of imperialism, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire, yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase the white man’s burden to justify imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilisation that is ideologically related to the continental-expansion philosophy of Manifest Destiny of the early 19th century.
context_section_description: In the early 20th century, in addition to "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), Mark Twain's factual satire of the civilizing mission proposed, justified, and defended in "The White Man's Burden'" (1899), it was Kipling's jingoism that provoked contemporary poetic parodies that expressed anti-imperialist moral outrage, by critically addressing the white-supremacy racism that is basic to colonial empire; among the literary responses to Kipling are: "The Brown Man's Burden" (February 1899), by the British politician Henry Labouchère; "The Black Man's Burden: A Response to Kipling" (April 1899), by the clergyman H. T. Johnson; and the poem "Take up the Black Man's Burden", by the American educator J. Dallas Bowser.
  In the U.S., a Black Man's Burden Association demonstrated to Americans how the colonial mistreatment of Filipino brown people in their Philippine homeland was a cultural extension of the institutional racism of the Jim Crow laws (1863–1965) for the legal mistreatment of black Americans in their U.S. homeland. The very positive popular response to Kipling's jingoism for an American Empire to annex the Philippines as a colony impelled the growth of the American Anti-Imperialist League in their opposition to making colonial subjects of the Filipinos.
  In "The Poor Man's Burden" (1899), Dr. Howard S. Taylor addresses the negative psycho-social effects of the imperialist ethos upon the working-class people of an empire. In the social perspective of "The Real White Man's Burden" (1902), the reformer Ernest Crosby addresses the moral degradation (coarsening of affect) consequent to the practice of imperialism; and in "The Black Man's Burden" (1903), the British journalist E. D. Morel reported the Belgian imperial atrocities in the Congo Free State, which was an African personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium.
  In the historical survey of The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa, from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (1920), E. D. Morel's critique of imperial-colony power relations identifies an established cultural hegemony that determines the weight of the black man's burden and the weight of the white man's burden in their building a colonial empire. The philosophic perspective of "The Black Man's Burden [A Reply to Rudyard Kipling]" (1920), by the social critic Hubert Harrison, describes moral degradation as a consequence of being a colonized coloured man and of being a white colonizer. Moreover, since the late 20th-century contexts of post-imperial decolonisation and of the developing world, the phrase "The white man's burden" is often used by critics of foreign expansionism and interventionism to illustrate the perceived false good-intentions of Western neo-colonialism for the non-white world: civilisation by colonial domination.
caption: Soap and water are included to the civilizing mission that is the white man's burden. (1890s advert)
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