WHITE DUDE'S BURDEN

Abstract

Together with bold calls for reinstating outright colonial rule, many scholars and critics have turned to late nineteenth century categories to justify the so-called GWOT (Global War on Terror) carried out by the US and Britain. Led by the Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff, the Scottish conservative-turned Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, and the US neo-conservative Max Boot, as Marx warned in The 18th Brumaire, ‘they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language’ (Marx, International Publishers, New York, 1852/1963, p. 15). One of the old-fashioned battle cries preferred by these scholars is Rudyard Kipling's ‘White Man's Burden.’ However, much has changed in the ideology of imperial rule between the time of Kipling's poem and now. My essay delineates the most important of these changes and argues that rather than the hierarchical humanism that overdetermined the endeavors of propertied white men in the age of ‘White Man's Burden,’ a new relativistic anti-humanism is pervasive in liberal and conservative ideology in the global North. I nominate the new dominant logic of propertied white men ‘White Dude's Burden.’