White burden

• White Man's Burden - a poem by the British poet Rudyard Kipling. It was originally published in the popular magazine McClure's in 1899, with the subtitle The United States and the Philippine Islands. "The White Man's Burden" may be read as supporting the U.S. colonization of the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies or, alternatively, as a warning to the United States of the cost of imperialism. Although Kipling's poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States latched onto the phrase "white man's burden" as a euphemism for imperialism that seemed to justify the policy as a noble enterprise.