The racialized and violent biopolitics of mobility in the USA: an agenda for tourism geographies

As I write this piece, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) has just issued a travel advisory for Missouri (USA). The travel advisory comes in response to a long history of race- and gender-based hate crimes in the state, none more publicized than the killing of Michael Brown by police in the city of Ferguson and recent incidents at the University of Missouri. Prompting the advisory more immediately was the recent passage of a law by the Missouri legislature that makes it more difficult for plaintiffs to sue for housing or employment discrimination. The travel advisory also references a ‘state attorney general report that found African-American drivers were 75% more likely to be stopped and searched (by police) than white drivers’ (Coleman, 2017a). The NAACP is clear to point out that it is not banning or boycotting travel to Missouri, but warning minority travelers of safety concerns and the heightened chance of unnecessary search and seizure and potential arrest. In words of Missouri NAACP President, Rod Chapel, Jr., ‘People should tell their relatives if they have to travel through the state, they need to be aware….They should have bail money, you never know.’ (Coleman, 2017a). I use the controversy in Missouri as a springboard for reflecting on the still under-analyzed travel experiences and struggles of African-Americans, even though they represent important unreconciled civil rights movements. I also encourage scholars to place their critical studies of tourism geographies within a historical and contemporary understanding of the racialized and often violent biopolitics of mobility within the United States.

It is uncertain what the ultimate impact of the NAACP travel advisory will have on tourism or addressing the precarity of black life. Thus far, the Missouri Division of Tourism has been silent and some critics paint the advisory as a publicity stunt. Not everyone within the African-American community supports the action, with local St. Louis NAACP chapter leaders calling for a revocation of the advisory. They fear that African-Americans holding hospitality industry jobs across the state would be unfairly hurt (Coleman, 2017b). While the efficacy of the NAACP's advisory is in doubt, it provides scholars and hopefully tourism industry officials a productive reminder of the uneven and unjust realities that await African-Americans as they move across their own and other communities. There is a lengthy history of tourism and hospitality being a site for racialization within the United States. African-American marginalization, if not outright exclusion, was foundational to the modern, white-dominated American travel industry (Alderman & Modlin, 2013). Yet, the NAACP advisory also speaks of tourism's potential as a tool of resistance and the capacity of social actors and groups to challenge these historical and continuing racial inequalities, holding them up to the public as illegitimate if not shameful. For while the NAACP may not be telling African-Americans not to visit Missouri, the advisory could damage an already fragile state promotional image and economy by tapping into a well-established tradition of black consumer activism and defensive travel strategies that pre-date the civil rights movement.

We would hope that stories of African-American motorists encountering discrimination and police hostility would have ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet research, news accounts, and personal testimony over social media (Benjamin & Dillette, 2017) suggest that many modern black travelers remain apprehensive and fearful of racism even as they exert greater, positive agency over their own tourism patterns. This fear of racism on the road is a product of stories of mistreatment handed down across generations, but there are certainly ongoing instances of racism (Lee & Scott, 2017). Indeed, for the past four years, I have participated in a multi-university project examining how the managers of contemporary southern heritage tourism sites, specifically plantation museums, reinforce an exclusive sense of place and time that forgets the history of slavery and black civil rights to provide romanticized and comforting images to white visitors. Well into a new twenty-first century, these destinations actively work to dispossess African-American locals and travelers from their ancestral claim on the nation's history and these touristic places (Alderman, Butler, & Hanna, 2016).

Not until the past several years have discussions on civil rights, African-Americans, and the racial politics of hospitality appeared consistently within tourism's top journals (e.g. Benjamin, Kline, Alderman, & Hoggard, 2016; Buzinde & Santos, 2009; Yankholmes & McKercher, 2015). It is heartening to know that the editors of Tourism Geographies have helped give visibility to some of this work (e.g. Carter, 2008; Gibson & Connell, 2007; Small, 2013). However, these gains are modest and there is still much that tourism scholars, particularly those engaged in the geographic study of tourism, can and should do to advance our understanding of the processes and consequences of the racialization of travel space. I suggest that ‘biopolitics of mobility’ is a potentially useful way of conceptualizing and analyzing the racial power dynamics shaping and being shaped by America's geographies of travel and tourism.

A biopolitics of mobility, inspired by Tyner (2013), seeks to shift discussions of African-American travel beyond the limited consideration of consumers, markets, demand, and travel choice to place the movements and feelings of black travelers within a more critical and wider political context. From a biopolitical perspective, discrimination in tourism is part of a larger history and geography of controlling black bodies, lives, and affects. In this respect, tourism geographies are coordinates on the same map as struggles for integrated public transportation, fights to relocate to certain neighborhoods, and the right to walk and drive in public spaces without threats of violence and racial profiling. By examining tourism in terms of this racialized biopolitics of mobility, scholars would recognize the indivisibility of tourism from the everyday bodily politics of moving through and occupying space and making place. I would argue that a study of the travel experience of African-Americans versus whites, and in particular the anxiety that characterizes minority tourism, should not be attributed to discrimination or any other factor as if it were simply an explanatory variable. Racism, perceived and real, matters not just as a measured prejudicial attitude or behavioral index; racism comes to be socially and spatially important through the way it is imposed upon, felt, and resisted through the moving black body of tourists and travelers.

A biopolitical approach to mobility and tourism pays close attention to how mobility is intertwined with ‘the political negotiation of life,’ the elite control of marginalized bodies, and the survivability of vulnerable populations (Tyner, 2013, p. 702). The exercise of white control over mobile Black bodies has long had a major impact on where and in what state these bodies and lives are allowed to exist and belong, recognizing that life opportunities are intertwined with one's location within networks of places. In this respect, while the recent travel advisory for Missouri may seem new and revolutionary for tourism scholars and members of the public, it represents something that African-Americans have long realized and lived with daily. The racialization of travel does not simply compromise the touristic access and experiences of people of color; rather it also enforces an uneven distribution of citizenship and, in some instances, it violently threatens one's very life chances.

I would suggest that future geographic studies of tourism follow the lead of scholars such as Jennifer Devine (2017), who have sought to uncover the many types of violence (physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural, etc.) that ‘interweave in practice to produce the built tourism environment’ and create the ‘unequal power relations’ between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ (Devine & Ojeda, 2017, p. 605). Of course, this violence and dispossession also sets the stage, as seen in Missouri and elsewhere, for forms of spatial resistance from the survivors of that dispossession. Tourism scholars are well served to explore the violent foundations and consequences of black mobilities; how, when, and where these biopolitics of mobility are controlled and contested, and how tourism geographies are inextricably linked to larger systems of oppression, resistance, psychosocial and physical well-being, and social justice. The activists in Missouri surely see this fundamental connection, even if not more scholars do. According to NAACP official Rod Chapel, the travel advisory will remain in effect until the state comes to terms with the disproportionate rate of people of color stopped by police and until Missouri prosecutors change how they handle hate crimes.