I have had the privilege of being a travel writer for a luxury magazine, and there is a recurring issue that I encounter every time I put the magazine together. I write this post not to put down the luxury travel industry — how could I, when I have benefited from it? — but rather, I write it because I feel like the biggest players in it can do better. In my line of work, I review four to five star resorts, and everything about their service is stellar, as it should be. However, when my editor and I receive the advertising materials to paginate in the magazine, it’s often an Asian person serving a white person in that image.
I get that the service staff are supposed to be local, but seeing so many instances of subservient Asian serving white people made me very uncomfortable. I have seen other collateral images showcasing mixed race or Chinese couples, but to me, it still isn’t enough as most of the ads I have seen feature the same people in the same positions, as though colonialism never really left.
Wait. It didn’t — that’s because the Southeast Asian region has been fraught throughout conflict in history, and many people in a lot of regions are trying to get out of poverty. Because of this history, white people still have a lot of privilege and get to enjoy whatever five star services these places can provide without looking at the face of poverty. This spillover of colonialism, as unintended as it may be, reflects the kind of inequality that is still present in society.
(Then, there is also the issue of bringing tourists into these countries, which are often poor. While many hotels try to give back to their employees, the money that often comes in via tourism is given back to the many tour operators and hotels that are set up here, and not to the locals. While I do feel like this issue is more contentious than the one I am writing about, I’ll need statistics to back up my claim, and fully flesh it out. In other words, that is for another post.)
I’m not saying that is is wrong to portray Asians serving people, because the nature of jobs in the service sector is, well, to serve. When one goes to another country, it is the locals that serve the foreigners. But what I would like to see is a more diverse portrayal of a hotel’s guests — surely not all guests at these five star resorts are white or Chinese — I would imagine that resorts would depict different people of different nationalities and skin colours, especially when they would want to attract people around the world to stay there.
After all, representation is everything — if I see myself represented in an ad, I am more likely to buy the company’s product.
I have also been given rather racist instructions, like including more “white-sounding” pen names in the blog roster, and putting more images of white people on holiday to make it more “international”. Yes, these actions are racist, but perhaps not consciously, as we have internalised a narrative of white dominance for centuries. That is difficult to erase. I am not making excuses for this, but rather, explaining how internalised racism affects how we present the products that we market.
What we can do is to be aware of such representations that still exist, and perhaps persuade people that “international” does not equate to bring white, and that different types of people should be seen in advertising. This is especially so in tourism, where the target audience should be people who come from around the world. It is easy to cast the white person in the role of the guest, but we have to bear in mind that the world is moving away from such dynamics. Hopefully, changing how different races are portrayed will also affect how they are perceived in the years to come.
As a Malaysian, I see the same thing in Tourism Malaysia ads. It’s a source of annoyance to me that these ads invariably feature white people as the tourists even though the vast majority of tourists to Malaysia are Asian.