Talk:The White Man's Burden
The poem is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and mind-set of imperialism. Surely, we say, Kipling meant it as a parody? The Anome
Surely, those of us who know about it say that this article hardly does it justice and only manages to take a very complex subject and reduce it to "it's racist". Pretty damned weak.
For those who care, the poem originally was only published in a popular magazine (McClure's) in the US. It was written specifically because IIRC, after the Spanish-American War, feeling in the US was more isolationist than not. Had the US not taken over Spain's position in the Philippines, another foreign power (quite possibly Japan) would have moved into the vacuum. AFAIK, Kipling wrote this specifically to help sway popular opinion in the US, so that a "friendly" western power would hold the strategically important Philippines.
Yes, in terms of today, we see the poem as racist -- if we are set to view things in simplistic terms, But I think it would be a tragedy to dismiss it as such. The racism is only a by-product of the conflict between "civilized" and "uncivilized" -- nowhere in the poem does Kipling say that non-Europeans are lesser because their skin is a different color. This doesn't mean that the idea wasn't prevalent in many parts of society, but the article as it now stands seems very tainted with a US version of racial views -- since most of the rest of the world stopped trying to justify slavery based on racial inferiority long before the US did, I'm not sure their views were the same.
That said, I'm not saying that racism wasn't an integral part of colonialism -- I don't think you can separate the two. However, I think that Kipling here provides an excellent source on the thinking of European colonialism -- THe poem basically says, "it's your unpleasant duty to go and drag these people kicking and screaming into the modern world. They don't want it. Your compatriots at home will profit from your efforts while despising you. You won't get rich and you'll probably die. But really, it has to be done, because in the long run, the people whose land you've taken will be better off, although the will hate you for it."
It's not ironic. It's just the product of an entirely different (but I would argue well-meaning, if somewhat futile) world-view.
Let the record here show I'm neither colonialist nor racist -- I just like to make sure we look at things and report on them in the context of their time. J Hofmann Kemp