Opinion – É Logo Ali: Place in black is everywhere

On May 12, seven North American climbers reached the peak of Everest. What could have seemed just another victory equal to those of the determined few who annually manage to reach the highest point on the planet, represented an unprecedented victory: this was the first group exclusively made up of black people to fulfill the challenge, after an intense crowdfunding campaign. and search for sponsorships for the Full Circle Everest project.

The feat is even greater when it is verified that, of the approximately 10 thousand people who managed to reach the summit since 1953, only 10 had been black until then. In other words, this small group almost doubled the bill, which draws attention to a real problem: the lack of black hikers, climbers and hikers along the planet’s routes.

Not that it is difficult to verify this reality. Those who have been practicing the activity for a longer period of time know very well that, if women are a minority, black people are a rarity. There are no statistics, not least because Embratur has never included skin color in the form that tourists fill in at establishments. But, as journalist Guilherme Soares Dias, editor of Folha’s Guia Negro blog, says, “take the neck test” and look around to see that the crowd of tourists is overwhelmingly white.

“Unfortunately, black people are hit by structural racism not only being denied performance spaces, but also being instilled with the idea that they are the ones who always need to work, that they don’t have the right to leisure, travel, hiking” , says Dias. He also recalls the economic aspect, which means that, as they are the majority among the poorest, black people end up not having many options for tourism. “But even among those few who are among the richest, there is a psychological issue, because when we organize events for them, there is engagement.”

From the community to the world

Among the exceptions that face the psychological and financial barrier is Wallace Soares, tourismologist and content curator at CIFS (Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies), who created the Desbravando as Américas project in 2015 to travel the continent alone. from Ushuaia to Alaska.

“The project was born in 2014, in one of the worst phases of my life”, says Soares. “I was unemployed, with a lot of debt and suffering from a great disappointment in love. I decided that I needed to travel, see the world, and for a week I was locked in my room putting together a travel itinerary through apps”.

The project seemed ambitious to the resident of the Morro do Turano community, in Rio de Janeiro, but the planning was carried out to the letter. “Assembling the script, I stipulated five goals that included getting a good job, physical conditioning, identifying the means of transport, accommodation and documents”, he explains. “The moment of rupture was when I realized that I didn’t need to be just a tourism workforce, but that I could be the protagonist of travel”. In June 2015, he put his backpack on his back and headed to southern Brazil.

“Since when I started making tracks I noticed that there was a delay, the lack of black presence in the trips was evident”, he says. “On TV there is no black travel show host, which means that the black person has no one to identify with,” he says.

With limited money, the initial intention was to stay in surf coaching, which is the rent of spaces in the homes of people with a simpler and cheaper structure than the Air Bnb of life. “But I only managed to stay in two houses, one in Santos (SP) and another in Joinville (SC), and that’s because the owner of the place was a black woman”. Asking for information on the streets, then, is a problem: “In Santiago, the woman thought I was going to rob her”, says Soares, indignantly.

There is no shortage of cases of explicit racism in society — and the tourism sector would be no different. In October 2020, the Caminhada São Paulo Negra, a city tour that tells the story of black places and characters in the capital of São Paulo, organized by Black Bird Viagens and idealized by Dias, was intercepted by a group of military police officers who claimed to have been informed of that the tour would, in fact, be a manifestation of the black movement, and that they would have to be accompanied. It was no use explaining that it was just a tourist tour and even showing the agency’s CNPJ. The tour was followed by two PMs on their motorcycles.

‘Racism doesn’t take a vacation’

The notion that tourism is for the few, evaluates Soares, comes from the time of the industrial revolution, when the British businessman Thomas Cook realized that people who were in the city wanted to know other places, which is a human need, is in the our DNA. “Since prehistoric times, human beings have been on the move and that’s how history has spread, but when everyone was stuck in cities, for most there was work and a few could afford to travel for months,” he says. . “That’s when the idea that tourism was for the few, a paradigm that needs to be broken,” crystallized.

Who agrees with him and works to help break this paradigm is journalist Antonio Pita, co-founder of the Black Diaspora project. Since 2016, the group organizes walks and trips aimed not only at black people, but also at the dissemination of culture, history and the black presence in the country. “Tourism is a movement of leisure, of fun, but racism does not take a vacation”, he emphasizes.

“The Black Diaspora project came from the experience, mine and that of partners like Carlos Humberto da Silva Filho, of situations we live in of discrimination and racism in tourist spaces”, says Pita. “There were barriers, there were impediments for quality services to serve us as clients and tourists, and we understood that it was important to raise the discussion and educate and organize services within a concept of promoting racial equality and diversity”, he adds.

The Black Diaspora emerged, then, with a focus on promoting black history and legacy in Brazil, creating a platform for sharing not only activities such as tours and travel, but accommodation and partnerships.

“In all, we have already taken more than four thousand people on our activities, whether with tours of a few hours through cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, or longer trips to various tourist destinations, always with guided walks to tell the story from another perspective, which connects these people with the Afro-Brazilian vision, making them feel that they belong to these spaces”, says Pita.