Pile on the Black Man’s Burden
The first element of significance about the poem’s opening line is that it immediately situates that this work is a dedicated and purposeful response to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” just two months earlier. That poem has been controversial from the moment it was published and has since does much to inflict damage upon the elevated status Kipling enjoyed for most of the 20th century. It is really just hardcore political ideology disguised as artistic expression in its bold and unambiguous celebration of white supremacy, the inferiority of cultures marked by darker skin, and the necessity of white nations to use their power and force to help civilize those not fortunate enough to have been born white
Tis a burden, to be sure, but what’s a pale white British dandy to do? On the other hand, those to whom the poem was not even directed turned out to be smart enough to read between the lines and get at exactly what Kipling was proposing: piling on the oppression which one would have thought had already reached a peak with the slave trade. The second significant fact about this quote is not it is not just the poem’s first line, but also repeats three more times as the first line of the next three stanzas.
Hail ye your fearless armies,
Which menace feeble folks
Who fight with clubs and arrows
and brook your rifle’s smoke.
The speaker is here addressing the mechanics of white nations taking on the burden of civilizing black nations with reference to the military might that is called upon when resistance to simple coercion is met. The overarching tone of the poem is corrosively sardonic irony which amply displayed here through juxtaposition. The white man’s burden is that being tasked with the unpleasant chore of civilizing savages which often requires meeting resistance to their charitable mission by using far superior weaponry against essentially defenseless opposition.
You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem,
And will take up the Brown,
Irony is once against the dominant literary technique put to use by the speaker to score points against the comprehensive idiocy of Kipling’s fundamental premise. How is that white supremacists like Kipling can possibly see themselves as the beneficent agents of civilizing the uncivilized when very recent history—ongoing history still playing out—reveals nothing less than the very absence of that ability? The process of “civilizing” the savages referred to here as the Red Man and more familiarly as the American Indian appears is one of genocide, property theft, relocation, denial of constitutional rights, and cultural devastation. Having so successfully dealt with the burden of the so-called Red Man, America is prepared to "civilize" those with brown skin in Cuba and the Phillipines through the superior power of its fearless army (The Spanish-American War).
