How racism still travels: traveling as a Black person

Traveling as a Black person can be an isolating experience especially in predominantly white, homogenous countries. Graphic by Ricki Kalayci.

Karen Herbert has had her fair share of travels in and out of the southern region of the United States. While she loves to travel and experience new places, there is one choice she must make before leaving as it has the power to shape how people view her — how will she style her hair?

“When I have my hair pulled back, [white people] don’t follow me,” she said in a phone interview with The Intersectionalist. “But when I have my hair picked out naturally, I’ve had the [North Carolina] Harnett County and Lee County sheriffs and police follow me to my car to see where I was going.”

Herbert relocated constantly due to her ex-husband’s job in the military. They were both required to move to Army bases in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina for seven years. She said she has become more conscious of her skin color due to the racist and micro-aggressive experiences she has faced in each Army base she lived in.

In North Carolina alone, Herbert has driven through areas with “KKK” graffiti, and her and her son have been called the n-word, she said. Although raising her family has allowed her to create fond memories, the past 20 years have been extremely difficult emotionally and mentally.

However, this experience is solely reduced to American travelers. Anti-Blackness is a global ideology; Black international travelers experience racism, othering, and hyper awareness of their skin color as well. Yanel Kette-Seka, a former film student at Franklin College, studied abroad in Switzerland her freshman year. Immediately after she paid her deposit, she realized that she would soon be in a small, homogenous European country for a few months.

“I wasn’t the most excited as most people are when they move into their dorms,” Kette-Seka said over a Zoom call with The Intersectionalist. “I was aware, before I stepped out, that I was the only person of color on that floor. The only other Black person that I had seen was my [resident assistant].”

Being the only Black woman in many of her classes was also unnerving for Kette-Seka. She said she felt a great deal of responsibility representing her demographic. With so many students coming from other homogenous countries who were equally represented on campus, it was difficult to fit in.

“I quickly learned and distanced myself away from a majority of the students because, for a lot of these people and a lot of the Americans, I felt like I was the closest thing they had gotten to a Black person,” Kette-Seka said. “I felt like a lot of them didn’t know how to approach me and just be normal with me. I didn’t feel like explaining myself or my existence, so it became really draining.”

This hyper awareness of being the only Black person in a white space was emotionally draining for Kette-Seka. She said studying in Lugano, Switzerland, made her feel othered because of the stares and looks she received as one of the few Black people in the area.

Yabbi Iria, a travel and lifestyle blogger and vlogger, said she’s also experienced being the only Black person in a majority white country, an experience that’s isolating and can hold intrusive implications. In Thailand, for example, Iria recalls being treated like a celebrity where people were staring, turning heads, and asking to take pictures with her.

“Traveling while being Black is different because you could be seen as intimidating or you get looked at more,” Iria said in a Google Meets interview with The Intersectionalist. “It gets annoying sometimes though, having people looking at you.”

In April 2020, Iria created a YouTube video detailing an experience in Santorini, Greece, where her friends were racially profiled. She said she loved Greece but that the experience was off-putting as the armed guards singled her and her friends out from a flight of all-white and non-Black people.

Iria said in her video that the guards provided little to no explanation for why they were holding them back, other than accusing her friends of having fake identification cards. It wasn’t until a boarding pass attendant spoke to the men that Iria and her friends were allowed to board the flight.

“My friend asked, ‘Why is it, because we’re Black?’ From that point, I was just really confused,” Iria said.

When traveling, Black people are often targeted by white people for no reason, which causes Black travelers to be hypervigilant with how they carry themselves. Other than wearing a different hairstyle, Herbert also said she also code switches a lot in white spaces.

“Seeing [racism] makes it more real,” Herbert said. “I prepare myself anytime I go out in general, but I think being here in a predominantly white county has forced me to pick up habits unconsciously for my protection.”

The prevalence of anti-Blackness nationally and internationally makes it difficult for Black people to feel safe and even harder to find spaces to express their concerns. Kette-Seka remembers how her professor prompted the class to take a moment of silence after walking through monuments in Switzerland about the transatlantic slave trade. However, everyone went back to normal at the end of the tour; there was no further discussion or acknowledgement of the racism and wrongdoings.

“It’s not okay that we’re learning about these things, having conversations about it, but then brushing them off,” Kette-Seka said. “At the end of the day, there’s not even a discussion or meaning behind it.”

Iria said she wants people to know about the racism she and other Black people experience but hopes the knowledge won’t deter people from traveling. She hopes to empower more Black women to travel the world by themselves and uses her travel video diaries to represent joy and adventure through a decolonized lens.

“It’s strange to travel sometimes knowing that you’ll be in the minority,” Iria said. “But honestly, I think of the world as my playground, and fulfilling that passion I have for traveling and experiencing everything are all stories I want to keep telling, over and over.”