The Racism Behind Digital Nomads
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 and best left to drown at sea.
The white man can come here on a tourist visa, rent a cheap place and make the most of his labor. He gets paid to update a restaurant website that charges $50 a meal and pays $5 here. It’s a good bit of labor arbitrage. He can go to Bali next, or Chile, or Zanzibar. He is contributing wherever he goes. He’s welcome. He’s a tourist. Countries advertise to attract him.
The brown man, however, is in chains. He can’t see it, but he is chained to the place where he was born. He cannot move. He cannot visit the white man’s land, not without proving that he has money and that he has ‘skills’ the white man wants. He can’t bounce from country to country, that’s a joke. Each country wants to know exactly when and how he’ll leave. By the time you fly to Paris on a whim, he’s still applying for the visa. Wherever he goes, he is unwelcome. He’s an illegal immigrant, he’s subhuman. Countries advertise that he’s welcome…
