What was the "white man's burden"?

White man's burden definition. 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.

The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), which invites the U. S. to assume colonial control of that country; the poem was published in The New York Sun, on 10 February 1899. [1