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
The letter from Duffy isn’t a regulation, but simply a request from a government official to pretty please stop doing art on the roads. It’s intended to erase Pride crosswalks and Black Lives Matter murals, and Governor Greg Abbott has directed local officials to enforce it. He issued a statement threatening the Texas Department of Transportation’s funding if it didn’t remove road art, saying “Texans expect their taxpayer dollars to be used wisely, not advance political agendas on Texas roadways.” His statement focuses only on the political, but the federal letter mentions “art” as well — locals don’t get to pick and choose how it’s enforced.
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.
