The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

For Easterly, the white man’s burden is a relic that haunts the actions of Western assistance and foreign aid agencies—and a basis for the Planner mentality that charges forward with “all the pretensions of utopian social engineering” (15). This approach fails because it reeks of the past “[w]hite imperial benevolence [which] was a strong staple of propaganda back home to justify the colonies” (278), and which sustains itself on grandiose utopian goals.

In addition, the concept of white man’s burden is antithetical in nature. Easterly outlines that one cannot include all of the following: “(1) the White Man’s Burden is acting in the interests of the poor in the Rest; (2) the White Man’s Burden is effective at resolving poor people’s problems; and (3) lots of bad things, whose prevention was affordable, are happening to poor people. If (3) happens, then either (1) or (2) must not hold.” For Easterly, the disappointment of the white man’s burden is that it refuses to see itself as “visible policy with visible dollars meant to help visible people” (240), and therefore it results in unproductive measures.