The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Scholars have long debated if White Man’s Burden is a love letter to imperialism or a satirical take-down – Kipling was an avid imperialist but was also a satirist, and his intentions with the piece aren’t fully understood. However, the poem and the term have been propelled to the heights of infamy due to the application of the core concept around the globe.
Personally, I prefer Henry Labouchère’s acid-tongued retort, The Brown Man’s Burden:

Pile on the brown man’s burden
To gratify your greed;
Go, clear away the “niggers”
Who progress would impede;
Be very stern, for truly
‘Tis useless to be mild
With new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Pile on the brown man’s burden;
And, if ye rouse his hate,
Meet his old-fashioned reasons
With Maxims up to date.
With shells and dumdum bullets
A hundred times made plain
The brown man’s loss must ever
Imply the white man’s gain.

Pile on the brown man’s burden,
compel him to be free;
Let all your manifestoes
Reek with philanthropy.
And if with heathen folly
He dares your will dispute,
Then, in the name of freedom,
Don’t hesitate to shoot.

Pile on the brown man's burden,
And if his cry be sore,
That surely need not irk you--
Ye've driven slaves before.
Seize on his ports and pastures,
The fields his people tread;
Go make from them your living,
And mark them with his dead.

Pile on the brown man's burden,
And through the world proclaim
That ye are Freedom's agent--
There's no more paying game!
And, should your own past history
Straight in your teeth be thrown,
Retort that independence
Is good for whites alone.

Fascinating how both of these poems were written in 1899, but still resonate to this day. (By the way, these are excerpts – the full poems are available by following the links.)The rest of teh article is damn good too

sanguinity

This video is of Glady, a transgendered woman in India, who is currently enrolled at University of Madras. Glady has been going to graduate school for Mass Communications while working part time. Many transgendered women in India are pushed to the margins of society where they are not able to do any work other than begging or prostitution. Many are subject to violence and inhumane oppression. With no family support and a very hidden life, she struggles to be the first transgendered woman graduate from the University. I have been helping Glady garner financial support to make it through graduate school, and together we have raised over half of her school finances! We only have $300 to go! Please help Glady in this final amount to one day become a journalist and ultimately a dignified human being.

Wanze Eduards and S. Hugo Jabini, members of a Maroon community originally established by freed African slaves in the 1700s, successfully organized their communities against logging on their traditional lands, ultimately leading to a landmark ruling for indigenous and tribal peoples throughout the Americas to control resource exploitation in their territories.

Logging vs. tradition
Suriname, located within the larger Amazon Basin, has opened up its immense tropical forests to extractive industries, all of which operate without local consent or oversight. It is the only country in the Americas that does not recognize indigenous or tribal peoples’ rights to own and control their traditional territories. Indigenous and tribal peoples who live in Suriname’s tropical forests comprise approximately 20 percent of Suriname’s population of 450,000.

The tribal peoples are Maroons, the descendants of African slaves who won their freedom and established autonomous communities in the rainforest between the late 17th and mid-19th centuries. The Saramaka are a specific group of Maroons that live in 9,000 square-kilometers of rainforest. In 1963, they lost almost 50 percent of their traditional territory to a hydroelectric dam built to power an Alcoa bauxite factory. Many Saramaka were displaced and remain in resettlement camps to this day. Others established new villages on the Upper Suriname River. In the late 1990s, the Surinamese government allowed logging companies to set up speculation projects and camps in the region, against Saramaka wishes. Further, extensive flooding caused by faulty creek bridging rendered a large area useless for traditional agricultural and other activities, thus depriving the Saramaka of an additional 10 percent of their territory.MORE

The Goldman Foundation said Eduards and Jabini helped changed the law so that prior and informed consent of indigenous groups will be required for major development projects throughout the Americas.

"They saved not only their communities' 9,000 square kilometers (nearly 3,500 square miles) of forest, but strengthened the possibility of saving countless more," the San Francisco-based group said in a statement.

Suriname's government, which had previously granted concessions to Chinese logging companies without notifying the indigenous tribes, announced in January 2008 that it would abide by the judgment of the Costa Rica-based court.

Officials with President Ronald Venetiaan's New Front coalition did not return calls Monday.

Jabini, who is studying law at the University of Suriname, said there has been no illegal clearcutting by Chinese companies since 2003 in the Saramaca's territory in the sparsely populated country. He said he hopes to protect his people's rights in the future, and is heartened by the number of young Saramacans who "now have a strong belief in the legal battle."

"The law has not changed yet in Suriname, so the government can always give a new (logging) concession. We have to pay close attention," he said. "We live with the forest, in the forest. We must protect it."

The Saramaka People v. Suriname decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized the right of a non-indigenous minority group to the natural resources within its lands. Three factors make the decision significant: First, it affirms that certain tribal groups are more akin to indigenous communities than they are to other ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities in terms of the rights they possess. Second, the holding adopts an evolving principle of international law and makes it a binding norm in the Americas, enunciating a test to guide future interpretations of Article 21 of the American Convention. Finally, the Court's incorporation of peoples' rights into its analysis renders the decision a topical contribution to current debates on the meaning and scope of these rights.

From 1970 to 2003, 1600 Samburu women were raped by British soldiers in the North of Kenya. Having dishonoured the community, they have been kicked out by their husbands. They gathered and created Umoja, the village where men are forbidden. This particularity created many problems to her founder, Rebecca Lolosoli.

Indigenous Peoples have fought for centuries against genocide, displacement, colonization, and forced assimilation. This violence has left Indigenous communities among the poorest and most marginalized in the world, alienated from state politics, and disenfranchised by national governments. In the Americas, Indigenous Peoples have a life expectancy 10-20 years less than the general population. In Central America, Indigenous Peoples have less access to education and health services, are more likely to die from preventable diseases, suffer higher infant-mortality rates, and experience higher levels of poverty than non-Indigenous Peoples.

The same general pattern holds internationally, and because of gender discrimination, the pattern is most entrenched for Indigenous women. Today, the human rights -- and very survival of -- Indigenous Peoples are increasingly threatened, as states and corporations battle for control of the Earth's dwindling supply of natural resources, many of which are located on Indigenous territories.

One key concern of Indigenous women is gender-based violence. For Indigenous women, violence doesn't only stem from gender discrimination and women's subordination within their families and communities. It also arises from attitudes and policies that violate collective Indigenous rights. As Dr. Myrna Cunningham, an internationally recognized Indigenous leader, says, "For Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous women, exercising our rights -- both as Indigenous Peoples and as women -- depends on securing legal recognition of our collective ancestral territories, which are the basis of our identities, our cultures, our economies, and our traditions." MORE


No Men Allowed! The Satya Interview with Rebecca Lolosoli


PDF:UN Documents: Mairin Iwanka Raya:Indigenous Women Stand Against Violence

One notices that some of the articles on the women, for example Ms. Emily Wax's for the Washington Post, carefully leave out the fact that the women were raped by British soldiers, thereby giving the impression that it was their own men who had pulled that off. The omission was also noted on her profile on the World Water Council website, again against the background of happily enumerating teh many and varied ways in which her fellow male tribe members had contributed to her oppression. funny that.

skywardprodigal

When Anita Florence Hemmings applied to Vassar in 1893, there was nothing in her records to indicate that she would be any different from the 103 other girls who were entering the class of 1897. But by August 1897, the world as well as the college had discovered her secret: Anita Hemmings was Vassar’s first black graduate — more than 40 years before the college opened its doors to African Americans.MORE

Think U.S. health authorities have never conducted outrageous medical experiments on children, women, minorities, homosexuals and inmates? Think again: This timeline, originally put together by Dani Veracity (a NaturalNews reporter), has been edited and updated with recent vaccination experimentation programs in Maryland and New Jersey. Here's what's really happening in the United States when it comes to exploiting the public for medical experimentation:

(1845 - 1849)

J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns' skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

(1895)

New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls "an idiot with chronic epilepsy" with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

(1896)

Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston's Children's Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

(1906)

Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

(1911)

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children's parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis ("Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War").

(1913)

Medical experimenters "test" 15 children at the children's home St. Vincent's House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

(1915)

Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through "a thousand hells." In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1932)

(1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library).MORE