Mamdani’s Stylist Mocked After Leaving First-Class Plane Seat to Avoid Sitting with White People: ‘Just Like Rosa Parks’

There are few things more fashionable in certain elite circles than performative “bravery.”

Enter Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the former Vogue editor and stylist for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, per the New York Post, who recently suggested she downgraded her airline seat to avoid sitting near “white middle-aged men” — and somehow expected applause.

In an era where every minor inconvenience is recast as a moral stand, this was apparently framed as self-care meets social justice.

Spare us.

Voluntarily changing seats on a plane to avoid people based on their race is little more than prejudice with some PR.

Karefa-Johnson took to Threads to share her oh-so-harrowing story on Tuesday.

“I just downgraded myself from first class to business class on my flight to Milan,” she bravely proclaimed. “In a cabin of 6, 5 of the passengers were white middle aged men … then there was me, a 30 something black woman who travels in that cabin often, and a male flight attendant who thought I’d be okay with substandard service and persistent micro-aggression from the moment I sat down.

“He was … wrong. I don’t suffer fools, and i would sacrifice physical comfort to protect my emotional and mental well being any day.”

Doubling down on her tacit racism, here’s one exchange she had with one of her like-minded ilk.

“I’m sorry you had to do that-you deserve to be anywhere and everywhere. They belong in economy,” one Threads user wrote in response to Karefa-Johnson.

(Could you imagine the outcry if a white person said something like “they belong in economy” about black people?)

“Hard agree! It’s just such a bummer that humiliation is part of the gratification for racists. Protecting my peace felt like letting him win and I hate that,” Karefa-Johnson responded.

But while whatever progressive circles that Karefa-Johnson occupies seemed to coalesce around her, her story eventually caught on with people outside that circle. And the mockery was brutal — and well-deserved.

Perhaps the most biting mockery came in just four words:

Just like Rosa Parkshttps://t.co/jlh7rWWLRK pic.twitter.com/W60hYI0Swr

— Sunday Sport (@thesundaysport) February 26, 2026

“Just like Rosa Parks,” one X account posted, citing a Daily Mail report on the incident, while clearly dripping with sarcasm.

Other responses to other reports about this incident were equally unsympathetic.

I’m sure they were devastated

— Rangers2026 (@ablake5055) February 26, 2026

Microaggressions are the act of interjecting your own insecurities into other people’s everyday behaviors.

— pop snap click (@popsnapclick) February 26, 2026

Invoking oppression while practicing your own flavor of exclusion is not just ironic — it’s insulting to the legacy of actual civil rights pioneers like Rosa Parks. Parks defied segregation laws to secure equal treatment under the law; she didn’t demand separate seating arrangements because she found the demographic distasteful. One challenged discrimination. The other is indulging it.

If the standard is that judging people by immutable characteristics is wrong — and it is — then that principle doesn’t magically flip, depending on who’s doing the judging.

Let’s be honest about the double standard.

If a white executive had hopped on social media to boast about downgrading his seat to avoid sitting near black passengers — complete with commentary about their race and a wink at how they “belong in economy” — his career would be over before the plane reached cruising altitude. The word “racist” would trend for days, and rightly so. Because judging strangers by skin color and announcing it to the world is, in fact, racism.

But when the prejudice flows in the approved cultural direction, too many people suddenly discover nuance. We’re told it’s “trauma,” or “self-protection,” or some other euphemism that politely launders open bigotry. The moral standard doesn’t change — only the enforcement does.

And that selective outrage is what corrodes trust. A society that claims to oppose racial essentialism cannot keep excusing it when it’s politically fashionable. Equal treatment under the rules means equal application of the rules.

No, Gabriella, you’re not Rosa Parks. You didn’t challenge injustice — you advertised bias. And if we, as a country, are serious about moving past race-obsessed tribalism, that kind of thinking deserves condemnation, not applause.

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