white man's burden

noun

1. the alleged duty of white colonizers to care for nonwhite Indigenous subjects in their colonial possessions.

White man's burden

noun

1. the supposed duty of the White race to bring education and Western culture to the non-White inhabitants of their colonies

white man's burden

1. A phrase used to justify European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling . The phrase implies that imperialism was motivated by a high-minded desire of whites to uplift people of color.

Word History and Origins

Origin of white man's burden¹

After a poem of the same title by Rudyard Kipling (1899)

Example Sentences

To me, the Man character is kind of a reclamation of the Kurtz character in “Apocalypse Now,” which always had this sort of romantic, Victorian White Man's Burden kind of racism to it because of its history, because of its source in “The Heart of Darkness.”

From Salon

This good soldier lost in a savage land facing the weight of the White Man's Burden, that kind of thing.

From Salon

Prison officials celebrated the Iwahig penal colony as a model “Prison without Walls” when they set about implementing a similar scheme at McNeil Island prison off the coast of Washington, in the Puget Sound, suggesting that taking up the “White man’s burden” of imperialism overseas had taught them how to better govern prisons domestically.

From Salon

People always had a funny relationship with “The Descendants,” the Alexander Payne film, with its “white man’s burden” plot — where Clooney is inconvenienced by the uncomfortableness of being a landowner in Hawaii.

From New York Times

The answer to both questions is yes — with the recognition that such attitudes were not far removed from those of American imperialists in the 1890s who assumed the “White man’s burden” in the Philippines.

From Washington Post