The Racism Behind Digital Nomads

White people can move, brown people are trapped

indi.ca
4 min readFeb 10, 2020

I see them at beach cafes, updating the website of some other cafe. The elusive digital nomad. Their natural habitat ranges from Bali to Goa, depending on avocado prices and currency fluctuations. They’re migrant workers, but don’t call them that, because racism.

The digital nomad orders a coffee. The brown man serves it. Neither can see it, but the waiter is serving coffee through the bars of a cage. The brown man is chained to the land. He has the passport of a shithole country and is universally acknowledged as scum. He himself acknowledges this. As it was in colonial days, the white man remains his superior.

A white passport gets you visa-free access to over 95% of the world. A brown passport lets you access maybe 20%. It’s God’s green Earth, but man has drawn thick black lines across it. If you have the right passport, these borders are invisible. For the rest of us, these borders are a cage.

A white person (or a person with a white passport) can go anywhere and be a digital nomad. You have no idea what a joke that is to someone black, brown or poor. Go anywhere? Without standing in line? Without proving that you're rich? Without having a return ticket? Without being rejected? Hahahahaha. Digital nomad my ass, we’re real nomads…

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indi.ca
indi.ca

Written by indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.

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