Opinion – Black Guide: Why have travel companies and influencers not yet incorporated anti-racism?

When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the debate on racial issues took over the internet, conversation circles between friends, the media and arrived and in companies. Influencers posted black screens, made lives, made room for black people to occupy their profiles. The wave has passed, the racial discrimination that attacks and kills on a daily basis has not. In tourism, we realize that structural racism has not regressed and travel continues to be a privileged space, accessed by a very small percentage of black people compared to the representation we have in Brazilian society (56%).

More serious than the low representation is remembering that black people take vacations, but racism does not. Even when black Brazilian women are in their leisure time, they suffer racial discrimination by other tourists or by the companies in the sector, which still refuse to train or carry out actions to combat racism. The racial theme still appears timidly in the debates and each event needs to be guided by movements of black people, such as the Afrotourism collective, which does not let it be left out of fairs such as Abav, WTM, among others.

When November arrives, the month in which Black Consciousness Day is celebrated (20), in which anti-racist actions become urgent, our email boxes are full of requests from companies guilty of having done nothing all year and worried about seem diverse when performing some action that month. In tourism, however, large agencies, hotel chains and even travel influencers seem to ignore this debate. Not even in November bother to address the issue.

So why haven’t tourism companies and influencers incorporated anti-racism yet? Because white people still don’t understand that it’s their role to fight racism; they have difficulty giving up privileges and spaces they have always occupied; they are not willing to get out of their bubbles, debate the issue and promote people and places of black culture; it hasn’t hurt the pockets of these agencies, hotels, transport companies and bloggers to continue focusing their business and communications only on whiteness.

If their faces don’t even burn with shame for just reproducing the same aged speech of tourism, one thing I’m sure: they are losing audience and relevance as the number of conscious black people and wanting to see themselves in these spaces grows. I could name here each of these companies and influencers to whom this text is addressed, but I’m sure the cap will do and I leave an urgent question for them: how about taking advantage of November to start carrying out anti-racist actions and extend them as a practice throughout the year? And, you, reader, make this text reach your travel agency, airline or transport company, hotel chain, travel influencers who follow and answer me: who should use their privilege to promote diversity in tourism?!