"The Black Man's Burden” is a poem written by H. T. Johnson in 1899. The poem was a retaliation to Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden” (1897).
In the poem, Johnson criticizes the subjugation of black people at the hands of their white oppressors. He calls out the systems of racisms that lay across the foundation of which the US has been built upon. He also criticizes the desire to oppress non-whites by bullying them through use of brute and military force, as a means of controlling them.
The poem consists of thirty-two lines and is written in iambic trimeter. It also follows a ABCBDEFE rhyme scheme, which provides a musical lyricism to the poem. The poem was written during the Philippine-American War (1899), which served as the basis for Kipling’s ideology of ruling non-white nations.
