Addressing her 116,000 TikTok followers, Nicole Phillip begins her story. “My first time traveling to Italy [around 2013] was through the NYU study abroad program,” she tells the camera. “And when I made this decision, the only thing on my mind was the pizzas, the vespas, the romance . . . but the one thing I didn’t realize at the time was that all of these examples of this romanticized image of Italy was told through the lens of white people.”
In the video, she goes on to share her experiences as a Black woman traveling in Italy, which included being dismissed as a panhandling nuisance when asking for directions on the streets of Florence and having beer poured on her during a stranger’s epithet-laced rant at the beach in Cinque Terre—and her stories triggered memories of my own semester abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
When I traveled there in the late 1990s as an eager college student majoring in Latin American history, I immediately stood out because of my race and was regularly subjected to stares, monkey noises, and assumptions that I was a sex worker.
I wasn’t the only one for whom Phillip’s TikTok resonated. The story (which she previously published in a 2018 essay for the New York Times) generated more than 10,000 replies, many of which included commenters’ reflections on their own experiences in Italy and beyond: “100% agree. I loved the art, culture, and food. But all of that was overshadowed by the terrible way I was treated,” said one. “Yes!! Spain is up there for me as well,” shared another.
A time-honored tradition
Beyond giving voice to a disturbingly common reality of Traveling While Black, Phillip was also participating in a time-honored tradition. During the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, several publications provided African American readers with similar kinds of firsthand information about travel destinations both near and far. Perhaps the most famous among them was The Negro Motorist Green Book, better known as the Green Book. Published by postal carrier Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1967 to provide African American travelers with information on where to safely and comfortably eat and sleep, The Green Book has been the subject of recent, expansive coverage in print, onscreen in an eponymous Hollywood film and a documentary titled The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, as well as a roving exhibition curated by author and documentarian Candacy Taylor (currently at Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center until October 13).
But it was hardly the only resource of its kind. Beginning in the early 20th century, Black-owned newspapers like the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American, together with Ebony and Jet magazines, were also tremendously valuable. And unlike the Green Book, which primarily focused on travel accessible by car within the continental United States, those publications took their readers all around the world.
When cousins Roberta G. Thomas and Flaurience Sengstacke traveled to Europe after their graduation from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1931, they turned to their uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbot’s newspaper, the Chicago Defender, to chronicle their year-long journey. The pair detailed their impressions of popular tourist destinations like Pompeii and the Eiffel Tower, provided intel on practical matters such as using traveler’s checks and getting around in foreign-language environments, and—most importantly—gave readers insight into what it was like to do all these things as African Americans. According to University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Ethelene Whitmire’s 2020 article in Smithsonian magazine about the cousins’ European tour, “They experienced highs, like watching the indelible Josephine Baker perform in Paris, and lows, including an encounter with racism on an Italian train ride.” The young women also relayed their conversations with Europeans who, Whitmire notes, “were both well-informed on and appalled by the treatment of African Americans in the United States.”
In addition to relaying trip information and helpful practical information, they equipped their readers with a sense of reality.
In this way, contributors like Thomas and Sengstacke, along with the bevy of fellow travelers and international correspondents who were employed by Black publications throughout the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras (including J.A. Rogers of the Pittsburgh Courier, Ollie Stewart of the Afro-American, and Era Bell Thompson of Ebony), provided a crucial service to readers contemplating going abroad as a means of escaping segregation and U.S. racism. In addition to relaying trip information and helpful practical information, they equipped their readers with a sense of reality. As historian Tiffany M. Gill wrote in “The Precarities of International Travel,” a 2021 article published in Modern American History about African Americans and international travel in the mid-20th century, “The color line did not magically disappear when African Americans left the shores of the United States; however, its boundaries were often so nebulous that it was hard to know what to expect.”
Picking up where the Green Book left off
Decades later, today’s social media content creators have picked up where this earlier writing left off. Indeed, many of the comments on Phillip’s TikTok post about her semester in Italy reflect an enduring desire among Black travelers to know what they could expect when going abroad: “Thoughts on Iceland?” asked one. “Have you been to Scotland yet?” inquired another.
The post is part of a popular series of reviews Phillip (@ncolphillip on TikTok) offers of various destinations—both international and domestic—based on her experiences as a Black woman. And she’s not the only content creator addressing such topics: On TikTok, a search of the #blacktravel tag reveals a rich collection of voices, including @thetraveltauruss (650,000 followers), who has posted about “Places I’ve Felt Safe Traveling as a Black Woman”; @worldlyroxi (90,000 followers), who has detailed “Where NOT to travel as a dark-skinned black person”; and @passportgoat (58,000 followers), who has shared “Places I’ve Felt Safest Traveling as a Black Man.” On Instagram, you can find TV host @oneikaraymond (302,000 followers), as well as communities like @travelnoire (784,000 followers) and @nomadnesstribe (96,000 followers), which provide travel guides and support for planning trips.
On TikTok, a search of the #blacktravel tag reveals a rich collection of voices.
Together, these social media accounts represent a thoroughly modern iteration of the Green Book and its contemporaries, all while adding modern flourishes like video, which allows audiences to see diverse destinations with their own eyes. But what does the continued existence—and the ongoing necessity—of this kind of travel content tell us?
For one, it tells us something about the mainstream travel industry and media landscape. From magazines and newspapers to television programs, this landscape is dominated by white people (who, according to online job search site Zippia’s survey of public data sets, represent 75.5 percent of travel writers and dominate related ranks in the field). For another, it tells us that mainstream content is not addressing the relationship between race and travel. When I was preparing for my semester abroad in Argentina, for example, there was nothing in guidebooks like Lonely Planet that acknowledged how differently travelers of various races would be treated in the country, even as it warned women travelers to be mindful of walking alone at night.
This enduring silence, among other deep-seated issues including white-centered marketing and social media campaigns, has led travel consultant Martinique Lewis to create a Diversity in Travel Scorecard for the industry, complete with a spate of failing grades. While the industry may think it is presenting race-neutral perspectives, what it is in fact doing is presenting a white perspective, acknowledged or not. No part of the USA or the world is race neutral, which is to say that there is nowhere a traveler can go where they will have the same experience regardless of their race.
In other words, today’s content creators are part of a long line of Black travelers, reporters, and writers who know something the mainstream travel industry does not: When it comes to travel, we can leave a lot of things at home, but our race is never one of them.
