How are imperialized people viewed by the writer in the poem "The White Man's Burden?"

In “The White Man’s Burden,” Rudyard Kipling takes a very negative view of imperialized people. He clearly thinks that they are inferior to white people and have many shortcomings.  Let us look at things he says to describe them in this poem.

In the first stanza, he calls them “fluttered folk and wild” as well as “half-devil and half-child.  This shows us pretty well what he thinks about imperialized people.  They are not quite human, being partly devil. Even to the extent that they are people, they are very immature and uncivilized.  They are “wild,” showing that they are uncivilized in his eyes. They are also “fluttered,” which implies that they are flighty and not very serious or mature. This same idea is conveyed when he says that they are half-child.

In the third stanza, Kipling says that the imperialized people display “sloth and heathen folly.  Sloth is laziness, so he is saying these people do not want to work.  He also says that they are foolish. Finally, in calling them “heathen,” he is using a term that implies that they are not civilized.

In the fifth stanza, Kipling calls the imperialized people “those ye (the British and Americans) better.”  In saying this, he is explicitly saying that the imperialized people are not as good as the white people.  In the rest of the stanza, he says that these are people who prefer to be ignorant, saying that they would rather live in their “loved Egyptian night.”

In all of these ways, Kipling shows that he has a low opinion of the imperialized people.  He thinks that they are lazy, immature, uncivilized, and possibly not fully human.