Member-only story
Literature and America
Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”
Is this an evil poem?
According to the historian, George M Frederickson, the writer Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem “The White Man’s Burden” to encourage the U.S. to annex the Philippines. It is a racist poem. Native Filipinos had taken up arms to eject Spain from their island and the U.S., in the name of whiteness and empire, had decided to intervene and put down the Filipino assertion of their freedom and humanity.
Kipling’s poem remains famous today. Born in Bombay, India (The British occupied India at the time) in 1865 to intellectual parents (John and Alice MacDonald), Kipling actually considered himself Anglo-Indian. His books, mostly his children’s books, would become internationally known. “White Man’s Burden” is written in 1898, a time when racist thought was beginning to crest in European circles.
Scientific racism was in vogue out of England and in America and America is an emerging powerful nation that is rooted in racist thought. This thought, as displayed by Kipling in his poem, still influences American social and foreign policy today from both of the major political parties: Democrat and Republican. Kipling thought so much of his poem’s potential at the time he sent the poem to Theodore Roosevelt in America after he wrote it. The London Times…
