You open Instagram, and start scrolling. You’re looking at a luxury hotel. You tap through the feed expecting to see the full spectrum of international wealth, and the diverse travelers who actually pay to stay there. Instead, you’re met with a wall of pure, uninterrupted whiteness:
Every model, every guest, every smiling face framed by marble pillars and crystal chandeliers looks like they came from the exact same white-coded casting call.
You check another hotel. Same thing. You check ten. Same thing. Then you look at these so-called luxury restaurants. Same pattern. At that point, it’s impossible to ignore.
Racists Are Doubling Down Covertly
That is when the realization hits with total clarity: the entire digital architecture of white-owned luxury properties is aggressively, unapologetically white-coded.
Take a look at Cavo Tagoo Santorini. They have been on Instagram for more than ten years, with nearly 1,500 posts, yet you can scroll through their feed until your thumb goes numb without finding a single non-white person featured. The Cavo Tagoo Mykonos account is no better. Neither are the other accounts around the brand. At some point, you have to stop calling it an aesthetic and recognize what it is:
racism operating in broad daylight.
Feeling adventurous? Type any luxury property in Europe, America, Australia, or elsewhere. The pattern is almost ridiculous. Look at Four Seasons Geneva. They wiped their entire slate clean earlier this year, completely resetting their feed from scratch. The result? An overwhelmingly white gallery.
Go to the Ritz Paris, the Plaza Athénée, or the Hôtel de Crillon. When a Black, Arab, Asian, or Indigenous face finally appears on those feeds, it is rarely a guest enjoying a suite, lounging by the pool, or celebrating a milestone. It is usually a member of the staff: a housekeeper carrying a tray, a valet parking a luxury car, or a porter carrying bags.
The staff are often non-white. The guests, the vision, and the aspirational fantasy remain white-coded.
Yet these luxury institutions, wherever white-dominated luxury culture has established itself, rely heavily on BIPOC capital, spending, and high-net-worth tourism to keep their doors open. Their digital presence, however, operates like a segregated country club from the 1950s, pretending the rest of the world does not exist except to serve them.
When you dig deeper into the curation, the mask slips even further. Take the Mandarin Oriental Paris. At least they feature some representation, right? But look closer at who they choose to highlight. It is “digestible Blackness”: mixed-race features, lighter skin, light-colored eyes, and Eurocentric facial structures that remain safely within the white-coded architecture of the space. Laughable.
Creators of color have lived this exploitation firsthand. White-coded institutions have stolen ideas from Black creators by asking them to describe the ideas they have in mind when pitching them for collaborative work, only to discard those creators and use the same ideas with white creators.
And to keep their minority quota from appearing suspiciously racist, they work with creators who fit a mold that does not threaten their white-supremacist culture. Because yes, it is a racist culture — inherited and maintained through the same racial hierarchy.
They choose “safe,” tokenized outsiders who can grace their hallways without disrupting the comfort of that hierarchy. The reality of these white-coded spaces is shifting. That is why they are doubling down on racism, which is at an all-time high but operating more covertly.
White supremacists see Black, Arab, Asian, Indian, and Indigenous travelers moving through these luxury hallways carrying their own codes of luxury, speaking their own languages, and refusing to tone down their cultures to accommodate colonial discomfort. The safe tokens are turning the tables, walking into rooms where they were told they did not belong. And those institutions are holding on for dear life to the remnants of a past that could not even sustain itself without the very people they hold deep-seated contempt for. Ironic, isn’t it?
The Current Wealth Hierarchy
The entire myth of white supremacy starts to fall apart when you look at where the money actually is. White supremacists peacock as though white people have a monopoly on wealth worldwide, while Arabs tend to stay humble and brag less. The House of Saud alone is estimated to control around $1.4 trillion — before even counting wealth that is hidden from public view.
The reality is galaxies away from the delusional fantasy white dynasties live in about who actually sits at the top of global wealth:
#1: Arab royal families
#2: Asian ruling families
#3: Black royal families
#4: White oligarchs
#5: Indian business families
This financial reality explains the relentless geopolitical and character assassination campaigns waged against Arab populations across media. Why try so desperately to villainize Arab people? Because Arab wealth is far greater than the wealth of many white power structures.
And there is another reason these narratives matter. Once a country is painted as a threat, a problem, or an enemy, it becomes easier to justify invading it, attacking it, controlling it, and taking what it has. Oil, land, resources, strategic positions — the story used to justify the intervention can hide what is actually at stake.
When an insecure power structure sees someone holding more than they ever could, the playbook is always the same: envy, projection, villainization.
The Pathology of White Supremacy
White supremacy is not a manifestation of strength; it is a manifestation of deep-seated, pathological insecurity. Look at the historical mechanics of how these empires operated, driven by what they lacked:
Physical Strength: They saw Black populations possessing physical strength, vitality, and resilience, so they built an industrial machine to enslave them out of envy.
Economic Power: They saw Arab populations holding immense, generational wealth, so they manufactured narratives portraying them as evil and dangerous.
Intellectual Depth: They saw Asian populations cultivating ancient, sophisticated philosophies, sciences, and societies, so they mocked and marginalized them.
Land and Sovereignty: They invaded Indigenous communities across the Americas, stripping them of their ancestral lands because they wanted the land.
Every single act of colonial violence was born from inferiority. A truly secure person, a truly strong civilization, never needs to announce its dominance. Strength does not demand a PR campaign, it simply is. Other global cultures never felt the same compulsion to play the global domination game because they never suffered from pathological insecurity.
When you look past the marble and the centuries of stolen wealth, you see something much more fragile. White-coded luxury institutions built a global image of luxury around themselves, their culture, and their idea of what wealth and refinement should look like.
This was never just about who gets through the front door. It was about who gets to define what luxury means in the first place. For generations, these institutions have presented whiteness as the standard of beauty, wealth, elegance, and success. They built the room, decided what belonged in it, and then coerced the world into believing that their reflection was the definition of luxury.
White Gatekeepers Sense The Shift
They can feel the ground moving underneath their luxury. For generations, they controlled the definition of elegance. They wrote the rules for what counted as fine taste, quiet luxury, high fashion, and sophisticated behavior.
If your skin was too dark, your language too expressive, your food too seasoned, or your culture too deeply rooted in traditions older than their own, you were marked as an outsider. You became an ‘exotic’ guest to be managed, a decorative accessory for a marketing campaign, or worse, invisible altogether.
Look at what happens when that illusion is broken. When Black, Asian, Arab, Indian, and Indigenous travelers enter these elite spaces without asking for permission, muting their accents, adopting a sanitized persona, or apologizing for taking up space, the entire structure begins to shake.
For centuries, they have been told that true beauty and sophistication are white. Generations of people were taught to see their own cultures as less valuable and to believe that white Western minimalism was the highest form of beauty and civilization. They were taught to leave behind their own rich traditions and ways of living.
The Spell Is Breaking
When bipoc families hold generational wealth that makes white dynasties look like working-class tourists, and when Asian and Arab markets drive major parts of the global economy, the white-coded luxury fantasy starts to look less like an eternal standard and more like an insecure performance.
That is why they guard their “luxury institutions” and social media feeds so fiercely. That is why they panic when their white bubbles become anything other than uniform whiteness.
Because if these so-called luxury spaces actually reflect the people who consume luxury, the illusion of white supremacy starts to shake. If people realize that luxury is not a country club built around whiteness, the whole house of cards collapses.