The Unbearable Whiteness Of Tourism
They call tourism the hospitality industry, but it’s hardly hospitable. Hospitality is a welcome that goes both ways. You are welcome to my home, and I am welcome to yours. Tourism is hardly that. White people are welcome to the world. Brown people have to show receipts.
Try being a brown person and getting a visa. Are you from Iran or Pakistan or Somalia? Fuck off. Are you from a slightly more respectable country? You had better not be a stinking poor, bring bank statements. We have to sit in embassies and outsourced processing stations like humble mendicants, proving that we will not despoil your land with our terrible darkness or poverty. Our passports are an embarrassment, each escape an exception the the rule. We wear stamps on our foreheads. They read: ‘Return To Sender. Soon’.
Meanwhile, at home, the beaches are white. Each cove is wrapped from corner to corner with sunburnt bodies, colonial descendants returning to enjoy their former lands. They don’t own us anymore, they have to pay us a small toll, indulge us as we unroll bundles of cloth and shells, offer to massage their feet.
