haha look at all those fucking bigots being too poor to travel
If you didn’t want to be a bigot, you should have been born rich and traveled more. That’s just science, don’t @ me.
I always hear people say this as a ‘gotcha’ but it doesn’t make any sense.
I have travelled while homeless.
People will be renting an apartment in a developed city, owning a car, going out to pubs/nightclubs, and then telling dirty backpackers, “God must be nice to have the money to travel!”
travel vs sedentism, neither one is necessarily more cheap/expensive than the other
That’s fair, but there’s a wide gulph between transient homeless and wealthy enough to pay all your bills and still travel the world. The overwhelming majority of people in the middle have to work full time to maintain their standard of living, and even the destitute will have responsibilities that prevent them from slinging a pack over their shoulder and riding the rails.
I agree that people should be encouraged to get out more and see more of the world, but that’s like telling people to eat more fresh vegetables and home cooked meals because processed fast food is unhealthy. People who can and do reap the benefits, but not everyone who would, can.
You could chime in that you grew up poor on a farm where your grandma’s garden was your only source of food, and that wouldn’t counter the point that for most people, fresh produce is either unavailable, too expensive, or too time-consuming to be a regular part of their diet. Likewise, most people cannot drop everything and become nomads hitchiking across the lands like fucking David Banner or Jarod the Pretender.
To put it another way, Travel is a luxury enjoyed by the unencumbered, whether by wealth or absence. It is not an option available to everyone.
Depends. Plenty of travelers end up dead due to malice or greed (among other things such as personal stupidity). I’m pretty sure they would have developed plenty of prejudice had they lived to share their tales.
Meanwhile all tourist-facing workers in every non-Anglo country have heard “I’M AMERICAN! SPEAK ENGLISH TO ME!!!” at least once.
I don’t travel. Is it common for the locals servicing tourists to not know at least enough English to get by?
Often, however:
- Tourists tend to seek out “authentic” parts of the country.
- Some places tend to German or French speaking tourists primarily.
- Tourist industries can have high worker turnover, so there’s always someone learning the ropes.
- Even perfect English might be unintelligible to a gammon if the accent is thick.
I saw a tiktok of a Brit talking about this with the upcoming ban in the US, and he made an interesting point. The Americans who can afford to travel and take time off work, are more often the ones who have lived privileged lives, and as a result act more entitled than the average American. He commented how interacting with regular Americans on tiktok changed his perception of what they are like, because only interacting with the tourists makes it seem like there’s a higher percentage of entitled a-holes.
May not work in all cases, seems like everyone that goes to egypt to see the pyramids comes back hating egyptians.
I’ve seen discussions where the topic was something like “Where did you travel to that you would never go back to again”, and the responses there heavily implied that travel can inspire racism.
I’ve only been to another country once in my life. In 2018 I was invited to present at a scientific conference held in Sicily, and my workplace sponsored my travel and accommodation costs.
After 6 days there, my takeaway was an unfavorable view of the local Sicilian people. This is obviously not representative of every person in Sicily, or Italians in general (Italy is a big place with lots of different regions), but I’m not in a hurry to go back to Palermo.
In my opinion, different kinds of travel inspire different things. Back in the day, travel necessarily meant mixing a lot with the people and culture you were visiting. Nowadays it’s much easier to travel in a “bubble” with much more limited contact to locals and culture, besides those trying to take advantage of the tourists
A lot of rich people like to feel like they’re getting an ‘authentic’ experience on vacation so they visit remote villages and hire locals (who are usually well versed in entertaining rich tourists) to give them ‘authentic’ tours and taste the local booze. I doubt this is what Twain was talking about though.
I can see that. Traveling while white invites a lot of peddling and harassment. The adult thing is to ignore all that though.
One of the Egypt stories involved men following a woman back to her hotel room, and she had to lock herself inside. They continued to come to her hotel everyday, and bang on her door telling her to let them in. She ended up spending the whole trip stuck in that room, feeling unsafe to leave until she finally got an escort to make it to her flight home.
Unfortunately in cases like that, it really sounds like it goes beyond something you can be adult about and just ignore. I think her main mistake was not doing better research about where it was safe to travel as an unaccompanied woman, as much as I wish that wasn’t a concern.
I think Twain here is referring to travel less as tourism, ie short vacations, but more about spending time living in different countries and getting to know people and their culture, making friends, etc.
Yeah I fully get the idea. A lot of racism is ignorance and fear. Humans are bad to take limited experiences of each other and assume that’s the whole experience. When you don’t have your own experiences with a different people, it’s easy to latch onto stories of how bad they can be and form your whole opinion around that. The best counter to that is to have good experiences instead, preferably through friendship.
But some cultures/etc make for a bad travel experience, and that will create or reinforce negative opinions. Living there longer is probably better, but the fact that racism still exists in mixing pot countries like the US proves that living together isn’t enough to make relationships good.
There’s an old meme of this quote superimposed over pictures of Hitler in various countries
