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white man's burden
noun
- the alleged duty of white colonizers to care for nonwhite Indigenous subjects in their colonial possessions.
White man's burden
noun
- 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
- 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.
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Word History and Origins
Origin of white man's burden1
After a poem of the same title by Rudyard Kipling (1899)
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