by Rudyard Kipling’s famously bitter counsel to his Anglo-Saxon brethren to “take up the White Man’s burden” in the Philippines. Though ingratitude, sabotage, and failure may be the results of the colonizer’s efforts, the poem suggests, he must be satisfied by the “judgment of [his] peers,” veterans of other civilizing missions, upon his “manhood.” Counterposing this racialized fraternity to the sour travesty of “silent sullen peoples” impassively “weigh[ing] your Gods and you,” the poem illustrates how imperialism constitutes white manhood as a transimperial community of judgment, even as judgment is thereby made available to appropriation by the colonized (291).
This understanding of U.S. conquest as a trial of white manhood, a liberating burden, was not merely an invention of the poet. Cast in decidedly sunnier terms, uplift was President William McKinley’s own reported justification for the war. In a notorious 1899 interview, first published by James Rusling in 1903, McKinley insists he had no initial interest in colonization. After nights of soul searching, however, he finds no alternative: returning the islands to Spain “would be cowardly and dishonorable,” handing them to another European power “would be bad business and discreditable,” and recognizing their independence would be disastrous, as “they were unfit for self-government.” “There was nothing left for us to do,” he concludes, “but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died” (22–23). However authentic the anecdote, it accurately illustrates the official rationales for war, recast as a moral challenge—encountered first before a transimperial community of whiteness, as a test of manhood (the gendered capacity for valor, honor, and credit), and second, in the face of a racialized population, recognized only as the object of responsibility. Uplift, in other words, is a moral duty, in the form of conquest.
Broadly speaking, what’s historically particular to uplift as a form of racial justice is its imagination of a benevolent relationship between subjects positioned differently in a hierarchy of civilization. As it worked to establish, certify, and justify inequality, its internal logic cast this relationship as a form of tutelary love. McKinley’s official policy of “benevolent assimilation,” as Vicente Rafael glosses it, is “a moral imperative” devoted to a “civilizing love and the love of civilization” (21), manifested primarily in education—the governing trope and signature policy concern of Anglo-Saxon uplift in the Philippines, as well as a primary field of debate for competing visions of Negro uplift.
The problem of tutelage holds an inherent paradox, what you might call uplift’s miraculous core: it aims to produce a free, self-determining subject through an imposed, coercive process disallowing that subject’s capacity to evaluate its fitness for self-rule. While this process may function in retrospect—an autonomous subject can narrate its passage from dependence to independence—it is impossible when imagined prospectively: to require another’s recognition of your capacity for self-determination is to be incapable of self-determination. To wait upon the grace of uplift is endless, for it is only ever bestowed after the fact.
In the colony, Anglo-Saxon uplift always deferred the autonomy it claimed to produce. One way to resolve this problem required internalizing tutelage within the collective and individual racial body, which is how Negro uplift sought its autonomy. By taking autonomy as a given, retrospective accounts tend to obscure the unstable intraracial split such tutelage produces—whether between the black middle-class subject and the benighted masses or within that precarious middle-class subject itself—behind the unifying force of racial pride as self-love. Both Anglo-Saxon and Negro uplift, then, heralded the emergence of an internally divided nonwhite subject who belongs in and to a transimperial realm of civilization while remaining marginal to any existing state capable of recognizing that subject as its citizen.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that these forms of uplift are equivalent, nor that one is less authentic or derivative of the other. Negro uplift differs in its primary emphasis on intraracial relations, though it was nonetheless profoundly shaped by interactions with colonized nonwhite populations, as well as the Anglo-Saxon uplift whose hypocrisies it exposed—black observers could excoriate white soldiers and officials in the Philippines while upholding the imperial mission’s ideals. But just as Negro uplift saw itself as more fully and properly embodying the ideals proclaimed by Anglo-Saxon uplift, it also shared an essential relationship to violence, moralized and moralizing: unable to recognize the autonomy of its inter- or intraracial object, racial uplift construes its prerogative of coercion as benevolent. Similarly, their shared historical conditions make them alienating to present-day sensibilities in analogous ways. As the prevailing form of racial justice in a period when white supremacism was hegemonic, both forms of uplift contain elements that appear to hindsight as unmistakably racist.
They also shared a more curious feature: the presumption, as a structural premise, of inevitable European civilizational decline, against which uplift’s subject was positioned as subordinate but rising, through a generative relation with its own, less civilized wards. Where uplift offered its lowly objects a tutelage in civilization leading, someday, to autonomous selfhood, it promised its advanced subjects protection from decadence or “overcivilization” through reinvigorating contact with primitive vitality. Underwriting uplift was a model of civilization joining hierarchical classification and the forward, upward movement of historical progress to the cyclical rhythms of birth, maturation, reproduction, and death. To be at the pinnacle of this civilizational schema is to anticipate a natural decline. Both varieties of uplift sought to engineer new forms of racial privilege as heirs-apparent to European empires, known and constituted by intercourse with more primitive groups. Among African American intellectuals in the period, the word “Occidentalism” was sometimes used to distinguish a desire for Western ideals from a disdain for white people who claimed them,2 a term even more striking if you recall its etymological origin—the identification of the west as the direction of the setting sun. Hence, I take occidented as my term for this shared orientation, upholding the primacy of Western civilization as the very promise of its downfall.
the missing link
The recent resurgence of an Afro-Asian comparative interest out of disparate investments within African American and Asian American studies, black diaspora studies and critical Asian studies, and American studies and ethnic studies3 has largely evaded the gravitational pull of the term “black Pacific,” as a parallel formation to Paul Gilroy’s phenomenally successful if often misunderstood 1993 book, The Black Atlantic.4 However, the phrase appears in two critical interventions worth noting. In “Toward a Black Pacific,” his afterword to Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s AfroAsian Encounters, Gary Okihiro points out that “the Pacific” as metonym “often and mistakenly stands in place of or in reference to Asia, especially East Asia” (313). As a brief corrective to this erasure of indigenous histories, he sketches “three intersections between Pacific Islanders and African Americans” (316): overlapping histories of bonded labor migration linking enslaved Africans, Chinese “coolies,” and Polynesian captives in Peru; networks of colonial education tying Tuskegee and Hampton to Hawai‘i; and circuits of popular culture bringing new styles of Hawaiian and African American music in contact since the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, an excavation of the historical confluences of Pacific Islander and black cultures is beyond the capacity of this book, whose comparative scope is already ambitious. Though it cannot substantively redress the erasures of indigenous Pacific histories and perspectives, I hope at least to unsettle their reinscription, and I follow Okihiro in emphasizing the multiplicity of racial categories that “the Pacific” invokes.
Another intervention is signaled by Etsuko Taketani’s essay, “The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way,” which tracks the multiple accounts Johnson gave of his participation, as consul, in the 1912 U.S. intervention in Nicaragua that led to twenty years of military occupation—an incident, he argued, that partly responded to rising Japanese influence, and that would be cited to defend Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Challenging the tendency in recuperative scholarship to explain black sympathy for Japanese imperialism as
