W.M.B.s

Back in grad school our first-semester macroeconomics professor assigned William Easterly's critique of development efforts, The Elusive Quest for Growth.  I so appreciated his accounts of failed efforts due to unintended consequences that on my own I later read Easterly's follow-up book, The White Man's Burden, with titled borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's poem.  I read a chunk of it during an airline flight - I took my seat and pulled it out, and minutes later my definitely non-white seatmate joined me.  If you ever have to explain a title like that you've already lost, so I spent the entirety of the flight consciously hiding any trace of the book title (else, "Oh, so I'm your burden now??!" )

Over this past long MLK weekend I read Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines about (obviously) the American experience in the Philippines, which I've always wanted to learn more about, particularly the Philippine war immediately after American took possession.  Karnow mentioned several times that Kipling's poem was actually written to encourage American imperialism in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war which won the islands for the U.S. (with the subtitle the poem is actually called "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands").  Karnow included a knowing vignette touching the ironies of black U.S. soldiers sent to fight in that war: 

By the summer of 1899, straining the levels set by Congress, some sixty thousand Americans were serving in the Philippines, and a year later their number had grown to more than seventy-five thousand - three quarters of the entire U.S. Army.  They included two Negro regiments known as "buffalo soldiers," a label pinned on them by the Indians, whom they had fought in the West.  "What are you coons doing here?" a bystander shouted as they landed in Manila - the which one of the blacks replied, "We've come to take up the white man's burden."