Mens Sana Foundation

On the White Man's Burden

’m not black. And so I don’t know what it’s like to be black. And I’ll never know what it’s like to be black. But I think that if I were black, I’d be outraged by the whole idea known as affirmative action.

You see, for the life of me I can’t see any difference between what Rudyard Kipling implied in his poem about the White Man’s Burden and what the proponents of affirmative action imply in their militant support of it.

Here’s how Kipling put it:

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.

Now what’s implied in those eight lines? Simply put, two things:

1. Blacks are inferior to whites. They are uncivilized, dark in habitual mood, and like children.

2. If whites don’t take care of the blacks, then they will go down the drain, so to speak, because they can’t make it in life without help from their "betters."

Now is the theme of affirmative action any different? I don’t think so. Implied in it are the notions that (1) blacks are inferior to whites and (2) if whites don’t make special allowances for the presumed inferiority of blacks, then they'll fail in life because they can’t cut it on their own.

You know, it’s pretty heady stuff to believe that someone else’s future is totally in your hands. It kind of puts you on the side of the angels. Guaranteed to inflate the ego.

But tell me, since when do the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Sowell, George Washington Carver, Leontyne Price, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Louis Armstrong, and a host of other blacks of extraordinary achievement need a handicap?

Think about it.