The beauty and entitlement of traveling as a tourist

I ran across this interesting podcast on NPR's Code Switch.  "Summer is a time when many Americans take off from work and set their sights on far-off destinations like tropical beaches, fairy-tale cities and sun-drenched countrysides. But in her book Airplane Mode, travel writer Shahnaz Habib warns of recklessly embracing what she calls `passport privilege' and how it can skew peoples' images of what the world is and whom it belongs to."

Airplane Mode makes the point that "[t]he color of one’s skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience."

The podcast provided much food for thought.  I learned about "passportism," the discrimination against people from certain (usually developing) nations.

KJ