Travelling Through Europe as a Woman of Colour
As I stood in a queue to buy a ticket from the bus station in Florence to my hostel, I spotted an older white man looking at me a few times somewhat hesitantly. Eventually, he said, ‘Do you speak English?’ When I nodded, he asked if I could help him with directions to get to his hotel. His phone had run out of battery. As a fellow tourist in an unfamiliar country, I could identify with the anxiety of being stranded without a usable phone. I looked it up. He noted it down and then proceeded to chattily ask me where I was from. The moment I said, ‘India’, I was greeted with the two inevitable questions, ‘How did I speak English so well?’ and ‘What was I doing there?’ Before long, I heard myself launch into a borderline defensive English-was-my-first-language-at-school, studying-in-London-for-the-past-year, just-travelling-around-Europe monologue.
I did not have to justify myself and my presence there. But somehow I felt compelled to do it. Maybe I read too much into those questions. Or maybe my brown skin had something to do with them.
I had spent the past year pursuing a Master’s degree in London. A week after handing in the last assignment and itching to get out of the UK, I had set off on a month-long trip to Europe. I make it sound more seamless than it actually was. I have an Indian passport. Which means travelling pretty much anywhere is preceded by meticulously booking flights, bus and train tickets, hostels and airbnbs and then waiting with bated breath for a visa — the permission to enter and linger in an unfamiliar city (but never for too long). I have always been an anxious traveller. Weeks before a trip, I am racked with anxiety, building up scenarios in my mind of losing my passport, my wallet, getting lost myself, getting on the wrong bus or the wrong train, missing a flight. And this time was no exception.
But there was one possible source of anxiety I hadn’t accounted for. And this would not have been misplaced. As a woman of colour in London, I was not unfamiliar with feeling out of place in overwhelmingly white spaces or the microaggressions they came with. I remember going for a play, quite early on after moving to London, at one of the city’s off-West End theatres with a friend and realising we were the only two people of colour there. I had initially planned on going alone. Sitting in that intimate (cramped?) space surrounded by whiteness, I was glad that my friend was with me.
For the most part though, I hadn’t had too many close encounters with ‘oppressive whiteness’. I was enrolled in a programme with a racially diverse cohort, and had a safe space of friends I could retire to when things went south. Save a few isolated experiences, I felt I could go about my life in London without feeling too much like an outsider. Of course, it was a privilege I enjoyed in no small part due to the lightness of my skin, the fact that I was there to pursue a university degree, and my status as a member of the shrinking middle class.
In any case, I was not prepared for how it would feel to travel through cities where sometimes I would not see any person of colour at all, where I would often keep a mental tally when I did. As I went in and out of galleries and museums, as I walked through local flea markets, as I sat down for meals alone at restaurants, as I went on walking tours and wine tours and day trips and hiking trips, I always found myself surrounded by a sea of whiteness. It didn’t come as a surprise. I was travelling through Europe. I had spent much of the last year reading about Europe and its normative whiteness, often disguised as colour-blindness. But I was not prepared for how out of place I would feel. There was something about being in these overwhelmingly white spaces that made me guarded, acutely conscious of my ‘outsiderness’.
No one bothered me. No one was unkind. Often when I asked for help, it was freely given. At other times, no one acknowledged me, save the occasional stare which, knowingly or unknowingly, marked me out as an outsider. I did not sense hostility, and yet there were moments when I felt I didn’t belong. I felt deeply aware of the colour of my skin, my accent. I remember standing in a queue in Berlin (Kreuzberg was an exception) to see the underground nuclear bunkers that were put in place during the Cold War. As I looked around, I realised the queue was made up entirely of people I read as white. I heard several different European languages rising up around me. Again, no one bothered me, no one even acknowledged me. But after standing there for barely five minutes I suddenly felt overwhelmed. I got out of the queue. I left.
As I travelled, I sought out places where immigrant communities (often code for people of colour) lived. I walked through Raval, home to a vast majority of Barcelona’s immigrants and working class folks. The streets were lined by South Asian restaurants with names like Bombay Kitchen and Maharaj. I heard a smattering of Hindi and Bengali as I passed by. While I sat at a cafe to rest my tired feet, I was warned by a well-meaning and friendly white lady to not leave my phone lying around. Maybe she meant well. But the subtext of that warning was this was a place where your phone might be stolen if left unattended. Because that’s what immigrants do.
Suddenly, in that setting, I had been singled out as the better-of-the-two-evils person of colour, presumably because of class privilege. Because I looked like someone who had the means to travel, not an ‘immigrant’ running a shop in a country where they did not really ‘belong’. I sat there for a long time. Where do you go to escape the (unconscious?) acts of microaggression of well-meaning white people?
The term ‘microaggression’ was first used by psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce in the 1970s. According to Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, racialised microaggressions are often subtle and not recognised as a real harm by both parties involved in the exchange. But its very invisibility makes it “more harmful to people of colour”.
Towards the fag end of my trip, I found myself deciding against expensive day trips, not because I couldn’t afford them (I could, though barely) but because prior experience had taught me that, more often than not, these were overwhelmingly white spaces. I was worried about being grouped together with a bunch of white folks for hours on end, feeling obliged to be social but also feeling a bit like a sore thumb.
During this time, I was reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ‘Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People About Race’. Often, I caught myself trying to turn the cover of the book to an angle that made it less visible. To avoid unwanted stares, to block out any potential confrontation. I couldn’t help but smile when I came to a certain incident she narrates in the epilogue. About a young black man who, while reading the book in public, was approached by a white woman who then volunteered to tell him that “the book he was reading ‘really didn’t help the conversation’”. In the book, Eddo-Lodge talks about her experience, as a black woman, of being immediately shut down whenever she raised the topic of race in white-dominated social circles. She attributes it to a deep-seated fear in her white conversation partners of being wrong, even as they vehemently resisted the suggestion that being well-meaning did not preclude them from enacting everyday acts of racism. Robin DeAngelo terms this white fragility, where “even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable”.
And so, when I tried to hide the cover of a book that explicitly calls out racism, I was, despite my better judgement, doing the labour of adjusting myself to the whiteness around me. Even when there was no hostility, my body, already aware of being singled out as an outsider, was always braced for potential confrontation and busy trying to erase all possibility of confrontation, often by trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. When I sought out places where immigrant communities lived, I was trying to achieve that inconspicuousness. There, if only to an extent, I blended in.
At my last stop, Prague, I discovered a little hole in the wall restaurant that served an Indian buffet. For the next four days in Prague, I found myself craving that food. I kept going back to it compulsively at least once a day, heaping my plate with servings of rice, lentils and paneer.
My behaviour struck me as garden-variety homesickness. Which was strange, because I had stayed away from home for a very long time now and had never been particularly homesick. Read differently, maybe familiar food had become a substitute for a safe space, the act of eating a moment of solace that I needed to settle my nerves, a retreat from whiteness.
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