When George Floyd was murdered exactly two years ago in the United States, anti-racism became an urgent agenda and companies in many sectors seem to have understood that they need to “get moving”. In tourism, however, there were no strong actions that removed the specter of racism in the sector and that encouraged blacks to travel more, or to see themselves represented in the sector, in charge of companies and events or, simply, not suffering racial discrimination while take a vacation.
Just do the so-called “neck test”, in which you look to the side and count how many black people are present in a given place, to realize that the number of blacks traveling is always far below the percentage of blacks in the Brazilian population: 56 %. On a flight from São Paulo, the city with the most blacks in Brazil, about 4 million, to Salvador, the capital with the highest percentage of blacks, about 80% of the population, you can still “count on your fingers” the number of people black or brown between passengers and crew.
The same will be repeated in honorees for historical monuments, tourist attractions, trendiest restaurants and so on. There is no survey that shows data on the number of black Brazilians traveling abroad or staying in hotels. In that long form that we fill out when we arrive at an accommodation, there is no field for: color (hello, Ministry of Tourism!). Perhaps, it is not in the interest of the hotel sector to have this data so as not to show this social gap, in a separation that, in 2022, still refers to the big house and slave quarters.
Hotels, by the way, have made an effort to be accessible to people with disabilities, some provide training to better welcome the LGBTQIAP+ population, but they still resist having racial literacy to receive blacks, in a hospitable way, in their structures. “We treat everyone the same,” they say. In a racist country, which insists it is not, this always goes wrong. The Afonso Arinos Law of 1951, the first to ban racial discrimination in Brazil, was only proposed after an incident. American ballerina Katherine Dunham was prevented from staying in a luxury hotel in São Paulo because she was black, as hotelier Hubber Clemente recalled in the podcast “Afroturismo, o Movimento”.
Since then, several incidents like this are still frequent in hotels, such as what happened in January of this year, when an American cultural producer knocked out a man inside the Hilton hotel in Rio de Janeiro, after suffering racist insults. Most of the hotel chain’s owners and managers are white, which is also replicated in small and large travel agencies; on airlines; at industry fairs; in specialized magazines; in the tourist sections of newspapers and magazines; reaching out to the producers of content on the internet, the travel bloggers – all of whom are very comfortable thinking that anti-racism should not be a concern for them, which shows that tourism is hit hard by structural racism.
A structuring problem of Brazilian society that is difficult to solve, but which needs to be overcome. Faced with the complexity, the question remains: which tourism companies are, in fact, working on anti-racism? Abav and WTM, for example, which are, respectively, the largest representative entity in the sector and the largest event on travel and tourism in Latin America, insisted on leaving blacks out of their structures and programs, but they are having to do their homework home and review their work.
There is still a lot to be done for the sector to advance in this regard. But one thing is for sure: tourism can no longer ignore black people and each sector will need to play its role to be more inclusive, attract more diversity and truly be spaces in which we, blacks, can tourist and not we care about racism.
