white man's burden

1. 1.

   the supposed responsibility of the white race to provide care for their non-white subjects

   Broaderduty

Questions about white man's burden

What does white man's burden mean?

white man's burden means "the supposed responsibility of the white race to provide care for their non-white subjects".

Is white man's burden a common word?

white man's burden is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.