The Whiteness of Airports

As a frequent traveler, I am struck by how much international travel has changed over the last three decades, much of it for the worse. Especially distressing is the manic security at airports which began with the highjackings of the 1970s and escalated following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and has been ratcheted up with every new threat, real and imagined. It now takes ingenuity to even travel with toiletries. On my recent trip from Chicago to Johannesburg via Paris my hair shaving cream was confiscated at Charles De Gaulle airport because, so explained the security attendant, a young black woman in heavily Gallicized English, the container was more than 100 ml. My pleas that I was in transit and the offending package had passed US airport security and my grooming for the next two weeks depended on it fell on deaf ears notwithstanding her sympathetic smile.

The deregulation of the airline industry, imposed with fundamentalist market zeal by the intolerant overseers of neo-liberalism in western capitals from the 1980s, seems to have engendered less efficiency than decline in services including the quality of airline food except for business or first class travelers which is not the lot of most academics or the flying public. Flight delays seem worse than I remember them. All this could of course simply reflect the nostalgic impulses of ageing. I cannot dispute that flying has become more pleasant with the banning of smoking. And airports are larger, better stocked with restaurants, bookstores, and upscale stores; they have been turned into malls for the weary traveler anxious for the addictive fix of shopping. They are certainly more crowded with the democratization of travel and explosion of mass tourism. But they remain largely white.

The whiteness of airports was quite evident on my recent trip. Chicago has a large community of people of color-as non-whites are strangely called; 42.5% of the city's population of 2.9 million is African American (as compared to 31.3% white non-Hispanic). But you wouldn't know that traveling out of O'Hare International Airport, America's and the world's second busiest airport (in 2006 76.2 million passengers passed through). To be sure, you see many Blacks among the airline and security attendants, servers in restaurants, and vendors in shops, but their numbers decline perceptibly among the passengers boarding flights. If they are relatively small on domestic flights, notwithstanding variations according destination, they are even more so on international flights. On my flight to Paris, which was full, I could count the number of Black people on one hand.

The flight from Paris to Johannesburg showed that the racialization of travel was not confined to the Eurozone of the North Atlantic, but had a more global reach encompassing Africa. There were only a handful of Black people on this flight to the southernmost tip of this massive continent, another confirmation that whites, who constitute a minority of the world's population, consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources and services including space and travel.

I have been intrigued by the whiteness of airports ever since my first trips to and from Europe in the late 1970s. Later when I moved to North America I was astounded by the fact that excluding African-born migrants there were so few African Americans or African Canadians on flights to the continent, far fewer in fact than on flights to Europe. Africa, I soon learned, was not the object of tourist desire for the African diaspora with the means to travel despite the seductions of heritage tourism engendered by the acclaimed television series, Roots. For generations the African diaspora has been taught to be ashamed of Africa, to be afraid of the contaminating backwardness of Africa, to regard the continent as a land of persistent pathology rather than potential pleasure. To this day, I meet many African American professionals who have been to the citadels of Europe or the beaches of the Caribbean, but not to Africa and have no intention of doing so. Many more of their white compatriots have fewer qualms going, although the Africa they seek to consume is the stereotypical Africa of animals or orphanages for the socially enlightened among them, the Africa of the mercy industrial complex, not the Africa of modern infrastructure, industries, and institutions. In contrast, on the flights I have taken to Japan, China, and South Korea I was impressed by the noticeable Asian presence, both of returning Asian visitors and of the Asian diaspora.  

The perils of the whiteness of airports came home to me on a trip to Venezuela in June 2006. There were very few Black people on the flight from Miami to Caracas. My first surprise when we landed was the number of Blacks I saw among the airport workers and taxi drivers. Venezuela's blackness expanded the further I traveled out of the smart districts of central Caracas into the dense favellas that carpet the hillsides of this sprawling city and the deeper I went into small towns several hours drive from Caracas, some of which were up to 70% or 80% black. My hosts, two Afro-Venezuelan professors, told me Blacks comprised at least half of Venezuela's population of 26 million. Even Hugo Chavez, the country's irrepressible president who delights in poking at the eyes of US imperialism, has some African ancestry; the country's disaffected white elite contemptuously calls him "El Negro."

The superficial whiteness of Latin America is evident when traveling to Brazil, which I visited following my trip to Venezuela. By all measures the African presence in Brazil is massive. Estimates of Africa's demographic weight vary because of the very contentious and complicated history of racial construction in Brazil, but most scholars agree that the Afro-Brazilian population constitutes nearly half of Brazil 188 million people. This makes Brazil, as President Lula boasted at the opening of the Second Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora (CIAD II) co-sponsored by his government and the African Union, the second most populous African country after Nigeria. While Brazil readily accepts and indeed embraces Afro-Brazilian culture as the foundational matrix of Brazilian culture, Afro-Brazilians themselves remain politically and economically marginalized.

This was disturbingly clear at the CIAD II itself, which was held in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, one of the centers of Afro-Brazilian culture and politics. Yet few of the conference organizers and attendants at the opulent convention center located in the white part of this overwhelmingly black city were Afro-Brazilian to the astonishment of many African delegates. Surprise turned to shock when a group of Afro-Brazilian activists, comprised mainly of workers, community organizers and students, stormed the conference on the last day demanding racial quaotas-as affirmative action is called. When they started singing ‘Inkosi Sikelele Africa', the anthem of the African liberation struggle, it finally came home to the African delegates the emptiness of Brazil's carefully cultivated myth of ‘racial democracy'. Many of us sang in solidarity, choking with great emotion, and I even saw a few shed tears of mutual recognition. The Africans finally saw the Brazil shielded from them on their flights and their hotels and the polite rhetoric of South-South solidarity, of internationalism stripped of its possible Pan-African anchors.

There are of course exceptions to the whiteness of airports in the Atlantic world, none more glaring than Haiti as I witnessed on my trip there in July 2007. There was a sea of black faces as I approached the gate for the flight to Port-au-Prince at Miami International Airport. The few whites wore their intrusion visibly. It was the first exception I had encountered to the whiteness of airports in Euroamerica. But it was also quite revealing, a testimony to Haiti's isolation and marginalization in the Americas, its contrived status as a pariah nation, shunned by white America, feared since the revolution of 1791-1804 that freed the enslaved Africans and presaged the collapse of slavery in the Americas and the onset of national liberation in Latin America. This was Haiti, proudly, uneasily black, proclaiming its blackness loudly in a world where its sister Caribbean islands have largely become playgrounds, extended beaches, tourist havens for Euroamerica. If this had been a gate for flights to these other islands the whiteness of the airport would have reasserted itself as a stubborn law of nature in a world of globalized apartheid.  

Flights to post-apartheid South Africa throw into sharp relief the racial politics of global travel and tourism, which is underpinned by the enduring imperatives of racial capitalism. South Africa of course did not invent racial capitalism that has characterized the Atlantic world since its emergence in the 15^th and 16^th centuries on the hideous backs of African slavery and Amerindian genocide, it merely purified it. Similarly, post-apartheid South Africa has not dismantled racial capitalism, it seeks to pluralize it. Modern travel and tourism are driven by the unyielding demands of global capitalism, which remains profoundly racialized.

Travel and tourism facilitate the social construction of space as a commodity that can be consumed and controlled. Thus, the consumptive and representational values that characterize international tourism are derived from, and help reproduce, Euroamerican material and discursive hegemonies. And so it is Hollywood not Bollywood let alone Nollywood movies that are shown on international flights and bland McDonaldized fare rather than more palatable Asian or African cuisine that is served, and the planes that ply the world's skies are themselves largely manufactured by Euroamerican corporations.

It is therefore not be surprising that the global tourism industry continues to be dominated by Euroamerican travelers and destinations. In 2007 the number of world tourist arrivals reached a staggering 900 million, 6% higher than in 2006. Africa accounted for 44 million arrivals compared to Europe's 480 million, Asia's 185 million; in percentage terms this translates into 4.9%, 53.3%, and 20.6% for Africa, Europe, and Asia, respectively.

What is surprising is that even where this is not the case, in the popular imagination the quintessential tourist remains white. Many a Black tourist in the Caribbean and in parts of Africa has been anguished and even angered at the preferential treatment accorded to white tourists, a troubling testimony to the deeply internalized valorization of whiteness and devaluation of blackness in postcolonial societies. The South African foreign minister was once forced to remind her compatriots that two-thirds of the tourists visiting the country in 2005 came from other African countries.

The mismatch between Black travel and white tourism was captured most poignantly this morning on South African television news. Two reports caught my attention. One was a tourism awards ceremony attended by the beautiful people desperately mimicking white Hollywood stars, in which South Africa bagged several prizes-Cape Town for the best African tourist destination and the Durban International Conference Center for the best African convention center. The other was a report on grotesque xenophobic violence against immigrants from Zimbabwe and other African countries in the Johannesburg township of Alexandria in which dozens were brutally beaten and raped. The violence made the headline of The Star newspaper: "Fear and loathing in Alex," the paper screamed.

As I read the paper on my flight from Johannesburg's Oliver Tambo International Airport to Port Elizabeth, the following paragraph jumped at me:

No detailed studies had been done on xenophobia and effective ways to address it successfully, SAHRC (South African Human Rights Commission) CEO advocate Tseliso Thipanyane said. "But it is clear that this problem is getting worse. We need to call an urgent meeting to look at the problem and find meaningful ways to sort it out. It's a peculiar problem in our country where the attacks happen in poor communities and informal settlements directed at African people, particular those darker than ourselves (my emphasis).

For a society with a long, ugly history of racialized violence, I find the xenophobic colorization of African travelers, tourists, and immigrants troubling, but not totally surprising. The wounds of apartheid, which preached the irredeemable inferiority of South Africa's own Blacks and the country's splendid exceptionalism in the African continent, remain deep indeed. As I read the paper, I looked around me. There were less than ten people of color on the flight, or to use apartheid nomenclature, that is, Africans, Coloreds, and Indians, out of more than a hundred passengers. There were about a dozen Japanese tourists as far as I could make out.

The rest of the passengers were white. Whatever their concerns, I imagined, marginality and its violent vulnerabilities was not one of them. They surely could take comfort from the whiteness of the flight, indeed from the whiteness of the global order embodied on my trip from Chicago to Paris, Paris to Johannesburg, and now Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth. Political apartheid in South Africa may be dead, but global economic apartheid is alive and well. That is what the whiteness of airports is all about: the racialized class privileges of travel and tourism that have enabled a minority of the world's population from a small corner of Eurasia to traverse the globe over the last half millennia and discover, conquer, shape, consume, despoil, and name places oblivious to the interests and gaze of the natives.

First Written May 14, 2008