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To me, the Man character is kind of a reclamation of the Kurtz character in “Apocalypse Now,” which always had this sort of romantic, Victorian White Man's Burden kind of racism to it because of its history, because of its source in “The Heart of Darkness.”

This good soldier lost in a savage land facing the weight of the White Man's Burden, that kind of thing.

Prison officials celebrated the Iwahig penal colony as a model “Prison without Walls” when they set about implementing a similar scheme at McNeil Island prison off the coast of Washington, in the Puget Sound, suggesting that taking up the “White man’s burden” of imperialism overseas had taught them how to better govern prisons domestically.

People always had a funny relationship with “The Descendants,” the Alexander Payne film, with its “white man’s burden” plot — where Clooney is inconvenienced by the uncomfortableness of being a landowner in Hawaii.

The answer to both questions is yes — with the recognition that such attitudes were not far removed from those of American imperialists in the 1890s who assumed the “White man’s burden” in the Philippines.