The biggest news today, besides COVID-19 pandemic is racism, highlighted by the murder of African-American, George Floyd by a police man in the US. The fallout has been a widespread protest with the #BlackLivesMatter in the US and across Europe and other parts of the world.
In this piece written for Conde Nast Traveler, Nneya Richards analyses the condescending role of western media and how it depicts the Black traveler as a local, rather than as an explorer.
Enjoy the article below…
Explorers have been deified through history. They have shaped our modern understanding of what it means to move around and discover the world—and who is granted the privilege to do so. Yet while many intrepid travelers are—and have always been—Black, their stories remain sidelined.
After all, how many people know the story of Bessie Coleman, especially compared to those who have heard the legends surrounding Amelia Earhart. Or the voyages of Arctic explorer Matthew Henson over those of Commander Robert Peary? All too often, whether it be in marketing materials, advertising, or journalism, Black people and other BIPOC communities are cast as the locals rather than the explorers, or simply left out of the conversation altogether. Even today, when the Black American travel market is a $63 billion industry, it sends a strong message about who has the right to freely travel.
“It is important for Black people, African people, to be at the center of their own narratives because there’s truth and honor and dignity in the stories that are told,” says Lee Litumbe of Spirited Pursuit. Litumbe’s blog was born out of her frustration, as a Cameroonian-American, with the way the continent of Africa was depicted in the Western media, from news segments on starving Africans to the charity infomercials of her youth.
She saw an entire continent painted as poverty-ridden or primitive; its different cultures, countries, and traditions all viewed through the same white savior lens. The stories of bustling metropolises and entrepreneurial men and women that Litumbe seeks to tell have never received as much coverage.
Since starting her blog, global partnerships with brands like Cartier and Clinique, plus tourism boards including Belize and the U.S. Virgin Islands, have taken Litumbe around the world. But she says the othering of Black bodies and lack of visibility in the travel space have still led her to be confused for staff at a hotel at best, and, at worst, a sex worker when traveling with her European partner. Like many Black travelers, flight attendants have assumed she is in the wrong seat in first or business class on an airplane. Litumbe hopes her platform will prompt fellow bloggers and influencers to consider why they only choose to post an image of a person of color when othering them on their travels, be it a beautiful shot of a vendor at a bazaar, or local children they have chosen to volunteer with.
Richard Wiese, the white president of The Explorers Club—ostensibly a bastion of the old guard of travel, where its members have historically been celebrated for “discovering” indigenous populations—is aware that the traditional notion of who gets to be an “explorer” needs to be expanded.
He says that exploration is moving away from the idea of “We discover these people, we want to study these people” to “We want them to be part of us and tell us what they know about the experience.” He adds: “You have to do more than just say we welcome everybody of all races. What is it that, if they walked into these doors, would not make them feel welcome, or feel like it’s a place they should be.”
After protests swept the streets following the death of George Floyd earlier this month, millions have been galvanized into action —including Wiese. In an email to the membership last week, Wiese voiced his support for “the peaceful protestors who remind the world that Black Lives Matter.”
He also outlined an initiative that the club has been working on for months: a fund to support diversity and inclusion, and to expand membership into the Explorer’s Club for people who have been historically under-represented in science and exploration. This includes scholarships to support membership dues and diversity and inclusion training for club leadership.
That lack of access and representation extends to other facets of the mainstream travel market.
In 2016 79.6 percent of travel agents identified as Caucasian while just 6 percent identified as Black, according to Data USA. This is changing. Take Evita Robinson, for example, founder of Nomadness Travel Tribe, an online community for adventurous travelers of color. Since its inception in 2011, she has grown it into a network of 20,000 members worldwide, bringing in roughly $50 million annually for the travel industry.
In 2015, Eric Martin and Kent Johnson founded Black & Abroad, a multi-platform travel and lifestyle company that leads trips focusing on culturally conscious luxury experiences for Black Americans. With Victor Hugo Green’s last historic Green Book published in 1966, and African Americans still looking for that safety and comfort when on the road, these Black travel communities remain essential. But it also creates an echo chamber of only telling our stories to ourselves.
“That’s why they don’t have any empathy,” says Sandra Vénite, USA director for the Guadeloupe Islands Tourism Board, speaking of non-Black people. “Because they’re not being told our story.”
Vénite finds it important to not only share Guadeloupe as a beautiful Caribbean destination, but also to highlight the island’s history of slavery and proudly African heritage. When curating her press trips, making space for a Black journalist to tell this story is something she is very deliberate about. Most of the time, says Vénite, this means the journalist is from a Black media outlet, but to her, it is important to tell the story of Guadeloupe to the Black diaspora. “I think the African-American market is a huge market for us,” she says. “It’s really the birth of traveling for Black millennials in America.”
Finding spaces to tell those stories is not always easy. Jennifer Johnson, vice president of Zapwater Communications, notes the lack of Black journalists or regular contributors on the mastheads of major publications, and says that public relations representatives sometimes have to advocate even more so on behalf of Black media outlets to convince clients of their value. Firms like Zapwater have made a commitment to do more community outreach, even offering pro-bono services to Black-owned businesses in cities where they operate.
When former Michigan senator Ian Conyers started traveling for conferences in his 20s, he noticed that BIPOC were mostly peppered across travel fairs, panel discussions, and marketing campaigns as a veiled nod to diversity. While he turned to Black travel groups online for more for information about traveling internationally—and found their encouragement pivotal to his travels—he wants larger travel brands to follow their lead. “It would be great to see people who look like you,” he says. “It would help get rid of the odd culture of not looking like the ideal traveler to others.”
For pilot, intrepid explorer, and television show host Kellee Edwards, the solution is clear: “Put the money in the communities.”
As a Black female pilot, Edwards represents a rarefied group that makes up less than 1 percent of the aviation community; Black pilots as a whole represent less than 5 percent. She is now the host of the Travel Channel’s Mysterious Islands and the host of Travel + Leisure’s new podcast, Let’s Go Together, but Edwards — who is afraid of heights — had to complete the extraordinary and expensive task of becoming a pilot to get there.
Even now, she is just one of two Black women out of over 60 Travel Channel hosts. The industry has made strides in inclusion of women both on screen and in societies like the Explorer’s Club, but young Black travelers need to see more faces like Edwards on their screens to know that being a pilot and an explorer can even be a possibility.
During a time when we are questioning the gatekeepers of the status quo, Edwards would love to see the diversity of the world reflected in travel programming extend to its hosts. When partners and organizations that she’s worked with have recently asked Edwards what they can do in true allyship, she implores them to invest in the Black communities.
“You’re making money off of the world,” she says. “The world is diverse. How dare you not reflect that in your company and your work. How dare you profit off of the world and not want to contribute to it in a meaningful way.”
Source: Conde Nast Traveler
