Rudyard Kipling
Although not technically a character in the text of the poem, Kipling’s presence hangs over it like a shadowy puppet-master. This verse is a direct response from the poet to a very famous and controversial work by the legendary British author of Jungle Book, among many others. Kipling titled his poem “The White Man’s Burden” which was really a work of political propaganda urging the United States (under the leadership of its new President, Theodore Roosevelt) to pursue the same sort of global imperialist agenda which occupied foreign lands ostensibly to take over the “burden” of civilizing their mostly darker-skinned native inhabitants.
The Speaker
The outrage of the unidentified speaker is captured in the opening line’s transformation of the charitable nature implied by the concept of white man’s burden into its genuine intent of conquest. The recurrence of the opening line’s calling for white nations to “Pile on the Black Man Burden’s” becomes the mantra of the already oppressed trying to send its message that it doesn’t need more oppression though the device of irony. That the speaker is presented without any identifying individual characteristics is part of the whole point of the poem: black people are never seen as individuals by those who would pursue the concept of them being a burden.
Native Americans
Native Americans as collective character show up in in sardonic reference to how white imperialism has already “sealed the Red Man’s problem.” This allusion to catastrophic genocide of indigenous North American tribes makes the speaker’s outrage palpable because he recognizes that solving the burdens of those whose skin isn’t white really means solving their own burden through any means including, if necessary, extermination.
