There’s a truly baffling trend right now in red states, where state and local governments are cracking down on crosswalks. It started over in Florida, where the state’s scorched-earth approach to queer erasure demanded the removal of a Pride crosswalk that served as a memorial to victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting back in 2016. Lubbock, the hometown of Buddy Holly, is caught up in the mix — authorities have demanded that the town’s glasses-shaped crosswalks be painted over with squared-off white lines, according to local outlet WFAA.
The crosswalks, which span a single intersection of Lubbock, were painted in 2020 to memorialize Holly according to a New York Times piece on their removal. Local regulators don’t actually seem to want the glasses gone, but they’re following a request from U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — a document that requested “intersections and crosswalks … be kept free from distractions. This includes political messages of any nature, artwork, or anything else that detracts from the core mission of driver and pedestrian safety.”
This is a bigoted trend
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The Buddy Holly glasses are headline-grabbing because they’re such an odd thing to remove, but they’re simply caught up in a broad net — a net made intentionally broad so as to obfuscate its aims. The fun glasses-shaped crosswalks are going away, but the real concern is why they’re going away and what else is going with them.