white man's burden

American  

noun

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

---

White man's burden British  

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 Cultural  

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.

---

Etymology

Origin of white man's burden

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

Example Sentences

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

Carlson's spirited defense of "civilization" and his rebooted version of Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" also leads to many questions.

From Salon

But he was also an influential apologist for imperialism, as epitomised by his poem “The White Man’s Burden” which suggested white people had a moral duty to civilise countries inhabited by people of other ethnicities.

From Reuters

This altar call is not much different from Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" or D.W.

From Salon

LaMont Green: “The white savior complex is a centuries old belief that it is the ‘white man’s burden to bring all the colored peoples of the world into civilization through colonization.’

From Seattle Times