However, while travelling has given Kira so many powerful and unique memories, like many other black travellers, she encountered many challenges as a person of colour. This was especially the case in China.
“I was in China with a group of people in the year 2000 and everybody was coming up and taking pictures as if we were a spectacle in a zoo, so that was pretty interesting. In Beijing, people were snapping random pictures of me all over the place. It was apparent that they were not used to seeing black people. So we became a bit of a spectacle. At times that was a little bit overwhelming having all these people take snapshots as if they were the paparazzi.”
However, it was not just the overt reactions that people had which presented challenges to Kira as a person of colour. There were also times when sexual stereotypes of black women led Kira to fear for her safety. She recounted one time when she was attending an international conference where female black travellers from all over the world would meet every two years in different parts of the globe to discuss issues that impacted black women.
She added: “I was in Japan in my early 20s and me and a group of other girls who were also black decided to go clubbing. At the time, the monastery had a curfew and opened art 6am so we decided to stay out clubbing until it opened at 6am. We found a nightclub and went into it. In the US at the time there were a lot of hyper sexual hip hop videos, bordering on pornography, that would come on late at night.
“When we walked into the club and we were there for 5-10 minutes before they changed the video screens to this very graphic, borderline pornographic hip hop video that they had access to. I started to feel very strongly about why hip-hop videos like that were a very negative thing. They certainly could have played hip hop that was not graphic – but this is what they chose.
“Unlike China, people in Tokyo were not shocked to see black people. But they clearly had a perception in their mind of what black women were. The thing that was quite tragic about it is that we were there to attend a sex trafficking conference and yet we were confronted with these types of issues. In retrospect. That could have ended up really badly.”