Through Glass

Through Glass: On Social Tourism, Storytelling, and the Atlanta BeltLine

By Caroline Estes

There’s a concept I’ve been sitting with lately—social Tourism.

It landed on me one afternoon like a weight I couldn’t shake, as I was preparing to lead another bicycle tour along the Atlanta BeltLine. I’ve been guiding these rides for a decade, sharing the city’s history, murals, transformation. I know these routes like I know my own body. I know the cracked sidewalks, the sweet smell of magnolia in late May, the shimmer of new construction rising where a corner store once stood.

But I also know this: we’re not just riding through a landscape. We’re moving through people’s lives.

I’ve come to see that these tours carry a tension: it’s possible for well-meaning riders to pass through neighborhoods like Vine City or Sweet Auburn and appreciate the murals, the landmarks, the beauty without fully understanding the history, struggle, and resilience beneath the surface.

Some call this social tourism: the act of observing a place shaped by hardship or injustice without fully engaging in its depth or honoring its people. It’s not about guilt. It’s about awareness. About slowing down enough to recognize that these are not just scenic routes, they are living, breathing archives of a city still healing from segregation, displacement, and systemic harm.

Neighborhoods like Vine City, Sweet Auburn, and Mechanicsville are not abstractions. They are home. They are living, breathing archives of Black history, faith, and survival. They are places where laundry still hangs to dry on porches. Where elders gather in folding chairs beneath oak trees. Where every block carries both memory and mourning.

And when we bike through these places with visitors, tourists, students it can sometimes feel like we’re watching through glass.

That’s where social tourism enters the frame. It’s not about malice or intention. It’s about imbalance. About what happens when storytelling isn’t met with stewardship. When curiosity isn’t met with care. When pain becomes aesthetic, and presence becomes performance.

So I’ve had to ask myself hard questions. Where is reverence, and where is spectacle? Where is education, and where is extraction? Where is the line between honoring a story and selling a version of it?

This doesn’t mean the tours are wrong. They’re not. I believe deeply in the power of public history, of art as access point, of walking and riding as ways of remembering. But it does mean that these experiences carry moral weight especially for those of us entrusted with telling the story.

And I want to be honest: I am a white Southern woman leading these tours. I carry that identity with humility that loving something means honoring its complexity.

I’ve never wanted to perform expertise. I want to offer presence. I don’t want to collect stories. I want to co-create space for them to breathe.

That’s what separates a tourist from a witness. A witness listens. Holds. Reflects. And stays.

I let this knowing guide me, not shame me. I let it serve as a compass. A responsibility. A quiet ritual.

Sometimes, I open my tours by saying:

“What we ride through is sacred. What you see today is not for entertainment. It is for remembering. For learning how to show up better.”

Other times, I ask my group to ride in silence for a block. To listen to the sound of the wheels and the wind. To notice what’s behind the murals the porchlight left on, the church doors open, the absence of a home that used to be there. We ride, and I carry my questions like prayer beads.

Because naming the discomfort doesn’t make me complicit. It makes me clear.

And from that clarity, I can build something better. Something that doesn’t harm. Something that holds dignity at the center.

I’ll keep riding. I’ll keep telling the truth, even when it trembles in my throat and I’ll keep remembering that these streets are more than routes. They are real. They are rhythmic. They are home.

We have to make sure that our community engagement doesn't lean into becoming a kind of social tourism where neighborhoods rich with history and pain are seen only in snapshots, not stories.

This essay’s real intent is not to criticize the BeltLine or the riders.

It’s to raise the standard for how we experience community spaces, especially those built atop histories of racial and economic exclusion