• The Unbearable Whiteness Of Tourism - Indi Samarajiva - Medium
    https://medium.com/@indica/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-tourism-c6ea653b32dc
    https://miro.medium.com/focal/1200/632/26/28/0*Mf1cp9kLd0Qr5B1u

    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’.

    If they want a hotel or nice meal, of course, it’s best to go someplace white-owned. The best properties are managed by foreigners or, as they referred to, ‘expats’. Not immigrants or migrants, those words are for the browns. And if an ‘expat’ decides to stay and work they’re not an illegal immigrant, they’re just ‘overstaying their visa’. That term is for the poors.

    While colonialism has ostensibly ended, our borders and — by extension — our minds remain colonized. Through language, through lines, through injustices that we ourselves enforce. We reject our own people at our own borders, they don’t even need to get to white man land.

    I’m quite happy if our beaches are white, but let the Louvre then be brown. Brown and Muslim even, the horror. And if people overstay their visas, fuck off, your colonial ancestors overstayed theirs for hundreds of years. Do away with the idea entirely and let us free.

    #frontières #racisme #tourisme