Racism, though still a problem today, is severely reduced compared to how openly racist ideas were expressed in the 1800s; Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “The White Man’s Burden” is one example. Response poems to his poem were varied and revealed many things about life at the time. One such response poem is “The Black Man’s Burden”, by Hubert Harrison. The poem uses possessive pronouns to emphasize the horror of being enslaved in one’s homeland and to accuse Kipling of expressing racist ideas in his poem. Words such as ‘you’, mentioned in the line “world you have defiled” are used to accuse the white colonizers of defiling land that belongs to the black people and treating it like the property of foreigners (Harrison, 8). The idea of property or people belonging to the black people yet being forcefully taken by the white conquerors falls under Harrison’s theme of objectification—the objectification of the black people, their property, and their lives all while they stay in the “country of their birth” (20). In this line, the word ‘their’[refers to African Americans and] is a possessive pronoun expressing the fact that the country that has been conquered belongs to the black people, and yet it is taken from them and they are forced to toil away in “their soil” and “their lands” at the whim of their conquerors (29-30). In both phrases, ‘their’ is used as a method of highlighting how land that belongs to the black people has been snatched away and is being treated like the property of their white overlords. Here, the word ‘you’ from the line “world you have defiled” comes into play again as an accusation against the white colonizers; it is repeated and used to point the finger at the whites and state that it is the colonizers to blame for the Black Man’s Burden, all while intensifying the horror felt. While mentioning the objectification of people, Harrison also subtly derides the colonizers for acting under the “fraud of freedom” because many of the conquerors believed that what they were doing was right and that they were saving the black people by enslaving them (43). Even more ironic is the alliteration used in fraud of freedom even though the two mean vastly different things—while freedom is a basic human right, it is not true freedom but a pale imitation and a fraud masquerading as true freedom. Overall, through the use of possessive words such as “their”, Harrison highlights the objectifying way in which African American people were treated by foreigners, and by association their land and part of their identity.

Works Cited

Harrison, Hubert H., and John Henrik Clarke. When Africa Awakes. Black Classic Press, 1997.

Kipling and the White Man’s Burden. London: Faber, 1968. Print.

Paull, J. Personal Interview, 9 September 2019.