The thinking of 1500AD and the Pope’s Doctrine of Discovery influences our thinking today. Do you remember Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden? “Take up the White Man’s burden/ Send forth the best ye breed/ Go send your sons to exile/ To serve your captives' need/ To wait in heavy harness/On fluttered folk and wild/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half devil and half child…”.

The famous poem is about the United States taking over the Philippines during the Spanish American War. Kipling saw the peoples of those Islands as “half devil and half child.”  That was 1898. An influential American, Senator Tillman of South Carolina, read part of Kipling’s poem to the Senate and addressed President McKinley to the effect that the US should control the Philippines’ ten million people because they “are not suited to our institutions … not ready for liberty…do not want it.”

The Senator, former Governor, a founder of the Red Shirt band formed to terrorize African Americans, and a founder of Clemson University, believed in the Pope’s Doctrine that we should colonize and enslave the brown peoples of the world.

The influence of that Doctrine is still with us, but yesterday (4/26/21) Raj Patel, the Indian owner of The Tillman Hotel in Clemson, changed the name to The Hotel in Clemson. Clemson University also wishes to change the name of Tillman Hall on campus, but a 2/3d majority of the South Carolina Legislature must approve that change. Will they? Maybe. The dominance of white Euro male privilege has been shattered like never before in 500 years but the fight of many in my white male tribe continues.

I ask, should we consider the Pope, Jefferson, Kipling, Tillman–and all those like John Muir–who believed white men are the best, to be evil?  More tomorrow.