Thread:
Most ppl know of the poem, "The White Man's Burden," the ultimate anthem for colonialism. But not everyone realises it was written by Kipling, author of the Jungle Book. And even fewer ppl know it was specifically written as an appeal to the US to colonise the Philippines

When you google the "White Man's Burden," typically this Pears soap ad comes up. The message cleanliness = a gift of civilisation = whiteness. Pears did a bunch of ads on this premise. But the White Man on this ad isn't some rando, it's Admiral Dewey! The man who captured Manila

Dewey sunk the Spanish float during the Spanish-American War and maintained control over Manila harbour after Pres McKinley declared American authority over the PH in the name of "Benevolent Assimilation" on Dec 21, 1898.

The little brown man begging for soap on that ad is America's new colonial subject - the Filipino, "half devil and half child" as Kipling described him.
But in mainstream discourse ppl dont realise the place of the Filipino in the creation of these myths.

The White Man's Burden & the Pears soap ad are staples of racial and imperial ideology of the Victoria era but they are rarely explicitly connected to either the PH or the US, which allows the US to be remembered as non-imperial and its exploitation (past & present) of PH ignored

and bc this connection is not made in either mainstream US or PH history & culture, the analysis of America's relations to the PH is not through a post-colonial lens. When it should be. This is how the US imagined the PH at the time of imperialism:

Ppl also don't know that the torture technique of waterboarding was developed during the Philippine-American War, the American global regime of surveillance was also pioneered during this period. Much of what America is today was forged in its colonial project in the Philippines

Anyway, that's it for now. Hopefully someone enjoys this thread and learns smth new!