The White Man's Burden / The Brown Man's Burden / The Black Man's Burden

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936).  Verse: 1885–1918.  1922.

The White Man’s Burden

1899 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,         5   On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples,   Half-devil and half-child.   Take up the White Man’s Burden—   In patience to abide,         10 To veil the threat of terror   And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple,   An hundred times made plain, To seek another’s profit,         15   And work another’s gain.   Take up the White Man’s burden—   The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine   And bid the sickness cease;         20 And when your goal is nearest   The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly   Bring all your hope to nought.   Take up the White Man’s burden—         25   No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper—   The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter,   The roads ye shall not tread,         30 Go make them with your living,   And mark them with your dead.   Take up the White Man’s burden—   And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better,         35   The hate of those ye guard— The cry of hosts ye humour   (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:— “Why brought ye us from bondage,   “Our loved Egyptian night?”         40   Take up the White Man’s burden—   Ye dare not stoop to less— Nor call too loud on Freedom   To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper,         45   By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples   Shall weigh your Gods and you.   Take up the White Man’s burden—   Have done with childish days—         50 The lightly proffered laurel,   The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood   Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,         55   The judgment of your peers! “The White Man’s Burden,” published in 1899 in McClure’s magazine, is one of Kipling’s most infamous poems. It has been lauded and reviled in equal measure and has come to stand as the major articulation of the Occident’s rapacious and all-encompassing imperialist ambitions in the Orient. The poem was initially composed for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee but Kipling decided to submit “Recessional” instead. Kipling, observing the events across the Atlantic in the Spanish-American War, sent this to then-governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt as a warning regarding the dangers of obtaining and sustaining an empire. Roosevelt would then forward the poem to his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”   The poem smacks of cultural imperialism, with the superior English going into a country of “sullen” brutes and imposing their civilizing behaviors and institutions. There is, of course, a mentality of the Social Gospel idea of philanthropy, which said that the rich and powerful had an obligation to assist the impoverished and the sick. While not necessarily a bad idea, it was still underlain with assumptions about racial superiority and helped to further more nefarious ways of establishing hegemony.   The German-American political theorists/philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in her famous discussion of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that “the fact that the ‘White Man’s burden is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.” (wiki) Originally, Kipling wrote the poem for the Diamond Jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), but it was exchanged for the poem "Recessional", also by Kipling. Later, he rewrote the poem "The White Man's Burden" to address the American colonization of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered from Imperial Spain, in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898); the birth of the American Empire.[2][3]

"The Brown Man's Burden"

Much like Lulu Baxter Guy's "The Black Man's Burden," Henry Labouchère's "The Brown Man's Burden" shifts the emphasis of Kipling's notorious poem, offering a view of imperialism from the perspective of those who were most directly affected by the expansionist policies of nations like Britain and the United States. "The Brown Man's Burden" offers an indictment of imperial hypocrisy, with particular emphasis on the violence employed in subjugating countries like the Philippines in the name of freedom.

The Brown Man's Burden

Pile on the brown man's burden
    To gratify your greed;
Go, clear away the "niggers"
    Who progress would impede;
Be very stern, for truly
    'Tis useless to be mild
With new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.
 
Pile on the brown man's burden;
    And, if ye rouse his hate,
Meet his old-fashioned reasons
    With Maxims up to date.
With shells and dumdum bullets
    A hundred times made plain
The brown man's loss must ever
    Imply the white man's gain.
 
Pile on the brown man's burden,
    compel him to be free;
Let all your manifestoes
    Reek with philanthropy.
And if with heathen folly
    He dares your will dispute,
Then, in the name of freedom,
    Don't hesitate to shoot.
 
Pile on the brown man's burden,
    And if his cry be sore,
That surely need not irk you--
    Ye've driven slaves before.
Seize on his ports and pastures,
    The fields his people tread;
Go make from them your living,
    And mark them with his dead.
 
Pile on the brown man's burden,
    And through the world proclaim
That ye are Freedom's agent--
    There's no more paying game!
And, should your own past history
    Straight in your teeth be thrown,
Retort that independence
    Is good for whites alone.

“The Black Man’s Burden”: A Response to Kipling

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands.” In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the “burden” of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. African Americans, among many others, objected to the notion of the “white man’s burden.” Among the dozens of replies to Kipling’s poem was “The Black Man’s Burden,” written by African-American clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson and published in April 1899. A “Black Man’s Burden Association” was even organized with the goal of demonstrating that mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of black Americans at home.

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Pile on the Black Man’s Burden.

'Tis nearest at your door;

Why heed long bleeding Cuba,

or dark Hawaii’s shore?

Hail ye your fearless armies,

Which menace feeble folks

Who fight with clubs and arrows

and brook your rifle’s smoke.

Pile on the Black Man’s Burden

His wail with laughter drown

You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem,

And will take up the Brown,

In vain ye seek to end it,

With bullets, blood or death

Better by far defend it

With honor’s holy breath.

Source: H.T. Johnson, “The Black Man’s Burden,” Voice of Missions, VII (Atlanta: April 1899), 1. Reprinted in Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1975, 183–184.

This poem by Lulu Baxter Guy turns the tables on Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden," suggesting that the real "burden" was borne by African-Americans under the weight of racial oppression. Making an impassioned plea for racial equality, Guy implores readers to "think of the brave deeds [African-Americans] have done," such as those of the black soldiers who took part in the charge of San Juan Hill during the recent Spanish-American War.

The Black Man's Burden

Take off the black man's burden,
This boon we humbly crave.
Have we not served ye long enough?
Been long enough your slave?
Cut loose the bands that bind us,
Bid us like men be strong.
Think of the brave deeds we have done;
Look not for all the wrong.

Take off the black man's burden,
'Tis this that we demand;
Think not of all the crimes you've heard
But that march up San Juan.
Oh, South, can't you remember
When you fought to hold our lives?
How loyal was the black man
To your daughters and your wives?

Take off the black man's burden,
Ye men of power and might.
Wait not one for another
But dare to do the right.
The blood, the smoke, the ashes,
Of martyred men that's slain;
Comes wafted to you from the south
But for another's gain.

Take off the black man's burden,
His mind can then expand.
He'll prove your equal in the race,
Stand every whit a man.
We'll wait till the burden's lifted,
And to those who crush us down,
Will come the words of God to Cain,
"Thy brother's blood crieth from the ground."