“The White Man's Burden” Summary

• The speaker exhorts the audience (assumed to be people identifying as "white") to perform a difficult task assigned to them by virtue of their whiteness. This task will require the best people in white society to go forth to another land, with an entire generation of young men essentially being exiled. These young men will be made to serve a foreign people they themselves conquered; paradoxically, the young men will have to serve their own unwilling captives. The young white men will be harnessed like horses awaiting the beck and call of an unreliable, nearly savage people, who have just been captured like prizes in a contest. These same people are not human adults, but both childlike and evil.

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  The speaker again implores the presumed white audience to perform this difficult task. This duty will require patience, and restraint. Though the speaker seems to think that the white race has reason to feel proud in comparison to the non-white races, the whites must restrain themselves from showing their pride in order to govern well. The whites must also use plain and honest language in order to be understood by those they rule. All this will not be for the benefit of whites but for the benefit of those they rule.

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  The speaker again implores the white audience to perform this difficult task. The speaker lays out what will be the goals of the whites who go forth to conquest. They will constantly have to fight wars in order to maintain peace in the lands they rule, and these wars will be especially cruel. The whites will also have to provide food for starving peoples and fight diseases among them. All these specific tasks worked on behalf of the non-whites will be jeopardized even as they near completion by the fact that the non-white, non-Christian races are both lazy and foolish. The speaker insists this will happen despite the whites' best efforts.

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  The speaker again implores the white audience to perform this difficult task. The imperialistic duty that the whites will take up is better than the traditional rule of kings and princes, because it is far more moral. The duty is more like a homely household task than a grand dynastic inheritance. The speaker mentions the roads and ports that the whites will build for the non-whites, neither of which the whites will themselves use, before adding that the whites will not just have to build these amenities, they will also have to die in battle to preserve them from ruin.

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  The speaker again implores the white audience to perform this difficult task. The speaker lays out the supposed rewards of this imperial project, which are negative and thus only rewards in an ironic sense. The whites will make the non-whites better by ruling them, but the non-whites will only respond with spite and blame, even when the whites protect them from worse enemies. The whites will be indulgent in a parental fashion toward the non-whites, who will cry out against their teachings. While the whites slowly bring them toward the light of civilization, the non-white people will cry out for the "Egyptian" darkness of their previous savagery, which they loved.

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  The speaker again implores the white audience to perform this difficult task. To do anything other than take up the burden would mean lowering oneself to an unworthy task. The audience may choose to decline the burden in the name of freedom, either the freedom of the non-white peoples or their own freedom from this responsibility, but to do so would be merely a cheat to hide the exhaustion that is the real reason for refusing the challenge. Moreover, the speaker insists, the non-white peoples will see through the subterfuge, deceitful tactic. They will know instantly that the audience declined the challenge from exhaustion and fear, and they will judge them accordingly. If the task is declined, the non-white peoples will judge not just the whites themselves, but the things the whites hold dearest, including their religion and their tradition, as unworthy.

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  The speaker again implores the white audience to perform this difficult task. The speaker then encourages the audience to grow up and put childish ways behind them. This will let the audience refuse tasks that will get them easy praise. Instead, the white audience will have to prove themselves to be adults, even if this task offers little reward over the years. And in the process, they will get the respect of their fellow adults, which is both more honest and more valuable.

  
  

• See: https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/rudyard-kipling/the-white-man-s-burden