thumb|right|300px|The editorial cartoon The White Man's Burden' (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)" shows [[John Bull (U.K.) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) delivering the world's people of colour to civilization (Victor Gillam, Judge magazine, 1 April 1899). The people in the basket carried by Uncle Sam are labelled Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, "Porto Rico", and Filipino, while the people in the basket carried by John Bull are labelled Zulu, China, India, "Soudan", and Egypt.]]
"The White Man's Burden" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.
In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898). With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem.
History
thumb|right|300px|"The White Man's Burden" illustration ([[Detroit Journal, 1898)]]
thumb|"The White Man's Burden" published in McClure's Magazine, February 1899
"The White Man's Burden" was first published in The New York Sun on 1 February 1899 and in The Times (London) on 4 February 1899. On 7 February 1899, during a senatorial debate to decide if the US should retain control of the Philippine Islands and the ten million Filipinos conquered from the Spanish Empire, Senator Benjamin Tillman read aloud the first, the fourth, and the fifth stanzas of Kipling's seven-stanza poem as arguments against ratification of the Treaty of Paris, and that the US should formally renounce claim of authority over the Philippine Islands. To that effect, Senator Tillman addressed the matter to President William McKinley:
He quotes, among other things, stanzas 1, 4, and 5 of "The White Man's Burden", noting: