Conclusion

Abstract

These two frequently quoted stanzas were written at the dawn of the twentieth century in response to America’s colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War (Kipling 1999, 334). Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” asks Americans to remember the lessons learned by the British Empire—that the responsibilities of empire are unrelenting and unchanging. The white man’s burden, sometimes invoked satirically, sometimes in great earnestness, has come to stand in for a highly problematic relationship between those with power and those they exploit. The phrase was often invoked in the conversations I had with travelers and crops up frequently in the political and entertainment news media surrounding Americans in Africa. The poem’s ambiguity when it was first published is echoed in how it is used more than a hundred years later, sometimes to underline the racism of the relationship between rich and poor in the world, and at other times as a call to relieve the suffering of others.

Take up the White Man’s burden

Send forth the best ye breed

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait, in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

….

Take up the White Man’s burden

The savage wars of peace

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hope to nought.