The primary meaning behind White Man’s Burden is that white people were “burdened” with the responsibility to “educate” and “civilize” the non-white people. It essentially justified imperialism for the white people taking control over non-whites (colonial territories). This can be connected directly to ideas of assimilation in the sense that by this ideology, the white people wanted to repress the cultures of the non-whites in order to assert their own upon them.
