Jack Dawson ran onboard the Titanic with just a ticket. He didn’t have to run home to get his passport, he didn’t have one in 1912. Passports only emerged during World War I. When the world wars ended white people began traveling freely again — passports a mere formality — but for the colonized world they became a formal way to keep us down. With a white passport you’re king of the world. With a colored passport, you’re welcome to the bottom of the sea.
If you have a rich/white passport, you can’t even see this. To you a passport is just a piece of paper. You can be a tourist, an academic, an ‘investor’, in love; you just get waved through. For most of the world, however, our passports are a wall. We get pulled aside, rejected, harassed, or deported. We get demonized, drowned, and have our children stolen. Rich/white people complain about COVID restrictions which are how most of the world just lives. Being colored or poor is worse than the plague.
This is all some ripe bullshit. Passports just launder all the world’s racism into barcodes and stamps, making it look all legal and polite, when in fact they have no formal basis in international law. Passports just sprung up in an unregulated way during the wars and remained…
