Kipling and Harrison

Hubert Harrison wrote, “The Black Man’s Burden (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling) in 1920.  This poem was written in response Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.”  Kipling’s work is almost a satirical piece that concerns the hardships that white men went through in the nineteenth century.  Today when I read Kipling’s work I have to laugh in order to avoid complete anger.  The fact that Kipling tried to argue that what he was writing about were hardships is disgusting.  In fact, I think that Kipling was trying to be comedic because I have a hard time believing that anybody could have ever believed that what Kipling is describing was a hardship.  Harrison did a great job in his reply to Kipling though because what he described as hardships are really hardships.  Harrison talks about the lies that the white men told the black men.  He talks about how the white men starved their slaves and still worked them day and night in terrible conditions.  Reading Harrison’s work makes me realize the seriousness of slavery in the nineteenth century.  Harrison’s piece truly depicts the struggles that the black men and women had to suffer through during such a terrible time in our nation’s history.  As an aspiring teacher I think that these two pieces would be great to compare in a history class.  I think that these pieces show exactly the differences between what white men thought of as a burden and what was truly a burden for black men.  It is important that we read and understand pieces like these so that we can create a future in which we do not recreate the past.  I cannot imagine living in a world where all of the men in one race were considered less human than another race.  I do believe though that racial inequality still exists and that bothers me.  I do not understand how someone can think less of a person because of his or her skin color.  After all of the revolution that has taken place in our country it would seem as though we would understand equality, yet we continuously forget.  Harrison did such a wonderful job of comparing what a real burden was to what Kipling described as a burden.  I think it would be important to point this out to students so that they could see how naïve white slave owners were, how they lacked work ethic in every sense.  How they thought controlling an entire race was a burden that they were forced to uphold when it was a burden that they could have put an end to without much effort at all.  I really enjoy comparing these two pieces for a number of reasons.  I am a huge fan of poetry, and Harrison and Kipling to a great job of using poetry to portray their thoughts and feelings.  Also, I think that by reading work from this time I get a better sense of what was really happening in the nineteenth century instead of the sugarcoated version that I got from history books in high school.