The white man's burden, a poem by Rudyard Kipling

The poem is subtitled "The United States and the Philippine Islands".

The speaker says to take up the White Man's burden, which is to send the best men abroad and your sons into exile to serve your captives. These "newly-caught" people are wild, angry, and both devilish and childish.

The poem is about imperialism https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-white-mans-burden-meaning-analysis.html an its consequences, more specifically, imperialist ambitions in the Orient. 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.

It exhorts the reader to take up the white man’s burden by sending the best of their country to dark, uncivilized places of the earth. It is about imposing their civilizing behaviors and institutions. Moreover, there is a mentality which says 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.

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