What does "A White Man's Burden" Mean? I have to write an essay on this PLEASE HELP!!!?

Question

What does "A White Man's Burden" Mean? I have to write an essay on this PLEASE HELP!!!?

Answer 1

Do your own homework - look it up on the net and research it silly rabbit, trix are for kids.

Answer 2

Looking after our poor colonial cousins (Indians, Africans, Asians) who couldn't look after themselves properly. And often still can't.

Answer 3

This is a phrase that originated with British author, Rudyard Kipling (see poem at link provided which you may wish to quote to impress whoever marks your essay!)

The tragic underlying idea was that most of the world - who happened to be non-white - were living lives of ignorance, filth, depravity and, worst of all, paganism and that the enlightened peoples of a small peninsula off Asia (i.e. Europe) had the responsibility to lift the unfortunates from their condition.

This was accomplished by spreading decimating diseases, murdering millions and enslaving millions more. very uplifting!

Today except in some pretty ugly supremacist circles, the phrase is used facetiously to indicate a mind set that ought to have died out no later than when colonies shook off their European rulers and became independent.

If I were doing this essay I would talk about how it was only very recently that North America's indigenous peoples -- the ones mistakenly but lastingly labelled "Indians" -- stopped being portrayed as dumb savages. I'd also try to find a great Gary Larsen cartoon  that showed the Lone Rnager in his old age looking up the name his sidekick Tonto always called him, Kemosabe, and discovering it meant, "horse's ***".  That would make a nice frontpiece for your essay!

Good luck!

Answer 4

Indians, Asians, and African.....man.........Western Education has got folks in a deep sleep.  

A white man.....is someone Caucasian, and not limited to being of North African discent.....including Moors (not berbers).

I think a "White mans burden" is the fact that Europeans have supressed so much information...and have to maintain a lie as we come out of the last phase of the dark ages...That's a HUGE burden as we enter the information age......and people realize that lots of history was destroyed by and sadly to say....Eurpoeans.  The burden is keeping this history from re-surfacing...which is starting to.....When you disconnect various people from thier past....you weaken them.  A burden is to keep them weak in a day in time when people can find more info.