“Rosa Parks is pretty cool” is the most lukewarm take of the century.

However, several bus lines across the country haven’t quite gotten the memo and have started co-opting her image. This readiness to co-opt Parks is performative allyship — and an ironic one at that. Her palatability is the core reason she has become deified as one of the poster children for civil rights, next to Martin Luther King Jr. of course.

Parks is known to have intentionally copied a young 15-year-old girl by the name of Claudette Colvin. Despite being the one to inspire Rosa Parks, she was erased from history due to her nonconformity to white respectability — darker skin paired with voluminous textured coarse hair and being pregnant as a teen. Rosa Parks is and should not be revolutionary to stand behind almost 70 years after her arrest.

Recently, the various WolfLine buses around NC State have begun reserving the front seat for a laminated picture of Rosa Parks, reserving a seat that could be used by the predominantly Black bus demographic.

The American Public Transportation Association reports that 60% of bus riders are people of color, the Black population being the biggest population within the statistic. However, this is not the result of Rosa Parks’ actions nor is it because any strides towards social justice or equity have been made.

Instead, it is the result of the privatization of transportation. Having a car has become a necessity for not only having access to better job opportunities, but a necessity for survival.

With the cost of housing steadily being on the rise, vehicular homelessness has become a rising percentage amongst the houseless. The chances of surviving and escaping homelessness are heavily dependent on one’s access to transportation. Despite this, public transportation continues to be underfunded throughout the country, making it an increasingly unreliable, dangerous and unkempt mode of travel.

The high percentage of POC bus riders is not because of equity or equality. It is further proof of BIPOC being at a higher risk of poverty and the maintaining of oppressive neoliberal structures.

If you’re still not convinced that this is all just performative: the sign is actively taking away a seat. The opposite of the goals of Parks. This seat could have been used by an individual with mobility issues or to simply rest the legs of anyone. When seats are taken away under the name of Rosa Parks, this does not progress the rights of minorities.

Instead, it creates an opportunity for the bigoted.

Now the bigoted have leeway to have a reason for their hate; after all, the woke culture is now taking away their bus seats!

Her lamination on the front bus seat is not only performative, but a regressive tactic to stall tangible change. Next time, WolfLine should just increase routes to local grocery stores for students instead. This would benefit the BIPOC population and Raleigh population hundredfold.