Debs: "The White Man's Burden" (1926)

I just came across this and thought I’d share: Debs, in one of his final articles, using the Osage murders to excoriate the crimes committed against American Indians and the grotesquery of the “White Man’s Burden.”

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The evidence that is coming out of Oklahoma in connection with the murderous conspiracy of long standing to rob the ignorant and unsuspecting Osage Indians of their inheritance and of the wealth that has come to them through the discovery of oil on their lands, is shocking and sickening to the last degree.

Here we have another startling and spectacular exhibition of how the white man bears his self-imposed burden of caring for the “inferior” races which are not able to care for themselves.

The white man and his scribes have for centuries, but more especially of recent years, vaunted the “superiority” of the white race and given themselves credit for benevolent guardianship of weaker races and bearing the weighty burdens of civilization. This has been “the white man’s burden” until it has become an almost nauseating theme, for as a matter of fact there has been a vast deal of hypocrisy and cold-blooded self-conceit wrapped up in it.

As another matter of fact, the white race has been the most ruthless, selfish and unscrupulous race in history.

Ask any intelligent Indian what he knows about the white man’s burden and his tender solicitude for weaker races.

From the hour the white man’s foot first touched this continent until the present day his treatment of the Indian natives, his ruthless spoliation of these innocent children of the forest, his lying, duplicity, dishonesty, treachery and downright villany and rascality constitute a record of shameless deception and betrayal without a parallel in history.

And now in these latter days, in the concluding chapter of this infamous and disgraceful recital, the Osage atrocities in Oklahoma stand out in shocking confirmation of the white man’s total depravity in dealing with the weaker races.

Scores of Indians, male and female, have been secretly murdered in one way or another in the land of “white supremacy” to rob them of their lands and their possessions in Oklahoma, and when it could not be done otherwise the “superior” white man, to prove that he was bearing the burden of civilization by caring for the weaker races, married an Indian woman and then had her murdered to obtain possession of her wealth.

The moral of it all is that the White Man’s “Burden” is himself, and that surely is some burden.