Several years ago the National Basketball Association implemented an extremely unpopular dress code, and you did not have to be a rocket scientist to know that the target was African American basketball players.
Understandably, school districts, given wide latitude by the courts, have also implemented more restrictive dress codes. Now it appears that communities across the country have decided to get in on the action by passing laws against wearing sagging pants in public.
Sagging pants style is worn by young black males, although a few white males wear sagging pants. This style, popularized in the early 1990s by hip hop artists, has become extremely popular across the United States. In Delcambre, Louisiana, a town of 80 miles southwest of Baton Rouge, wearing your pants in this manner carries a fine of as much as $500 or up to a six-month jail sentence.
Another town, Mansfield, fines offenders up to $150 and 15 days in the slammer. According to the esteemed mayor, “this new law will set a good civic image.” The success in passing these dress codes has inspired other communities to follow suit. Efforts to outlaw sagging in Virginia and statewide in Louisiana in 2004 failed, usually when opponents invoked a right to self-expression. But the latest legislative efforts have taken a different tack, drawing on indecency laws, and their success has inspired other lawmakers. With hip hop under serious attack from the song lyric police, the time is ripe to make a frontal attack on sagging pants. Next, they may go after the over-sized t-shirts.
For example, in the West Ward of Trenton, New Jersey, Councilwoman Annette Lartigue is "drafting an ordinance to fine or enforce community service in response to what she sees as the problem of exposing private parts in public. 'It's a fad like hot pants; however, I think it crosses the line when a person shows their backside,' Lartigue said. 'You can't legislate how people dress, but you can legislate when people begin to become indecent by exposing their body parts.'" While she is being general here, you can bet that sagging pants will be included in this ordinance.
From my perspective, sagging pants is nothing but a metaphor for the hip hop lifestyle. Critics of this lifestyle view sagging pants as a badge of delinquency along with its distinctive thug walk and disrespect for authority, whatever this means. Sagging began in American prisons, where over-sized uniforms were issued without belts to prevent suicide and the use of belts as weapons. The style spread by way of rappers and music videos, from the ghetto to the suburbs and around the world. Sagging pants are an easy and convenient symbol of the supposed dereliction and menace of young blacks.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Dave Nalle
Good lord, who cares how they wear their pants? If they wear them that way they mark themselves as morons, and what more punishment should they need?
Dave
2 - moonraven
[Personal attack deleted by Comments Editor]
Just shows that folks in the US are way beyond fiddling while Rome burns--spending their time writing laws like this instead of putting their government in front of a firing squad--the one instance where I would say that guns are okay is if Dick Cheney is smoking his last cigarette in front of a g roup of crack shots.
3 - Matthew T. Sussman
Can we get an amendment to ban Zubaz altogether?
4 - sr
I always wear baggy shorts to hide my depends. This keeps me from taking a shit in my cowboy boots.
5 - third eye
Hey Moonraven, Perhaps you shoud worry about whatever ass backwards country your from instead of trashing the most successful the world has ever known. Im sure you dont consider it jealousy, but we Americans sure do.
6 - Alessandro
Actually, third eye you may be on to something. Is there a Mexican version of BC? We could all go on it and bash Mexico to smithereens as she does America. See how she feels after that.
Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode when Jerry went to heckle Kramer's girlfriend (my pinky toe!)at work after she heckled him during his routine.
7 - Polly
Anyone caught wearing saggy pants should be drafted into the US marines, given a few weeks basic training to make them neat, tidy and psychotic and then shipped off to Iraq to kill ordinary people of all shapes, sizes and ages.
People caught wearing Jesus clothes - robes and sandals- should be stoned by a mob of born again retards and then nailed to crosses on the White House lawn.
8 - Constance
"Sagging pants style is worn by young black males, although a few white males wear sagging pants."
What research is this based on? None. Absolutely none. URBAN males in certain age groups are wearing the sagging pants. I'm tired of everyone playing the race card. I'll agree that it began with Black males, young and/or ignorant (not stupid, there is a difference - get a dictionary) Black males, but it is now a part of the urban youth culture. Hip Hop culture isn't identical to Black culture. I believe it is more closely aligned with urban culture. I don't like the sagging pants, but think about it. The "moral majority" also didn't like rock music, women in pants, mini skirts, low riders, etc.
I'm tired of our country being run as a religious state and I'm a Christian. I don't want men judging me. That is God's job.
9 - Elvira Black
Actually, I think the saggy pants thing may have run its course in NYC--just my observation.
10 - wdufkin
#7 As a born again retard with a baggy(ish) pants born again retarded son in the Marines I find your post comical!
11 - JustOneMan
"Why is da white man always trying to keep da brutha down".....Pleeeeaasssee....who gives a shit about a bunch of morons who want to dress up as their male role models ---- prisoners.
The black community better wake up.
JOM
12 - Nancy
Constance is right: I see as many (or more) saggy pants on young white guys as young black guys. It eventually clears up for the most part, when they get older & realize that the GIRLS don't LIKE saggy pants styles, but prefer their men to look neat, spiffy, stylish - along GQ lines. I would question what kind of parents, white or black, allow their kids to go out of the house looking like that, or to buy them in the first place? If I had a kid, that kid would be wearing what I say s/he wears until s/he's old enough to support themselves. At least that's the way it worked with me & my parents.
13 - JustOneMan
"I would question what kind of parents, white or black, allow their kids to go out of the house looking like that"
Nancy...thats the answer...the parents are not involved and they dont care!
JOM
14 - Mark Edward Manning
Sagging pants are just a macho version of low-rise jeans. It seems that everyone, including hip-hoppers, want to hop onto the "show yer ass" parade. Well, to be fair, with the saggy pants crowd, it's more a case of "show yer boxers," but the point is the same: it's showing something to the public that they should not expect to see. The reason many blacks themselves signed up to the anti-saggy pants platform was because they know that to get respect, you actually have to earn it -- and that's as true for everyone else as it is for blacks. I'm not going to hire some white kid with piercings galore and a spiky mohawk any more than I'm going to hire a black kid who thinks that, by the very virtue of his saggy, baggy pants, I'm supposed to endow him with unbridled respec'.
No, dawg, I don't play dat game. Yo.
Furthermore, if this was a fad, as you allege, it would have ended five years ago. It hasn't. It's stronger than ever.
Not that I really care. If someone dresses like a moron, I'm taking the liberty of treating them like one. Case closed.
15 - moonraven
[Deleted]
Third rock from the Sun:
I am a US citizen. Ergo, I will say whatever the fuck I want about the US--and in whatever venue I choose to do so.
[Gratuitous vulgarity deleted by Comments Editor.]
16 - Andy Marsh
The writer says sagging pants started in prison...I'd almost bet that any kid that had to wear hand-me-downs will tell you that sagging pants DID NOT start in prison...it started in poor families...that's where it started...buncha bullshit is what it is...the biggest farce in this piece is calling this any kind of "Style"!!!
17 - Christopher Rose
Andy, I had no idea you were so fashion concious!
I believe the writer meant the style of saggy pants started in US prisons. However, I had been led to understand the source of the inmate style was that the diet is strict there and this caused people to lose weight and thus their pants sag, rather than issuing all inmates with over-sized clothes to prevent suicides.
Of course, I hate the USA, so what would I know? ;-)
18 - Ray Ellis
Actually, the style did start in prisons, and it had more to do with a dominance/submission pecking order. Need I go on? How going from that translated into a gangsta style is anybody's guess.
19 - Baronius
Any "gangsta" trend lasts about three years among urban blacks, whites, and hispanics. Then it runs for three more years in suburban white high schools. (Suburban black kids just look on in embarassment.) Unless the droopy look has come back, it should have played itself out 3-4 years ago.
20 - Mark Edward Manning
Christopher Rose: "Of course, I hate the USA"
Evidently.
21 - Christopher Rose
M.E.M. I know at least one of us was being funny...
22 - daryl d
Ray, it had NOTHING to do with the "pecking order" that you fantasize so much about. Christopher Rose's post is correct. I did a paper on this when I was in College.
23 - Andy Marsh
I still say it comes from little brothers having to wear hand me downs...you gangstas can try to pretend that you invented it, but it was the kid down the road that lived on the dirt road and had an outhouse in his backyard, who's parents couldn't afford to buy him knew or used clothes and had to wear his big brothers old clothes, not some braindead assholes in prison.
And CR...I know it's really envy...but we love you anyway.
24 - Ray Ellis
You might want to start choosing your words more carefully, Daryl. I wasn't "fantasizing" about anything. I was merely stating a known fact culled from interviewing saggers. By the way, "college" is not a proper noun.
25 - Zedd
From what I gather from "the kids", excessive sagging is out. Hip Hop dress is now an over sized preppy look. Kids are wearing huge polos, and over sized plaid shorts.
What I heard was that extreme sagging in prison had more to do with advertising ones availability for sex... Could be an urban myth.
I do think that hip hop attire did cause young black males to be labeled as hoodlums. Now that the look has spread to all races, the look is accepted as another eye rolling youth engagement. I think that the desire to over correct by Black adults comes from understanding the visceral reaction to Black maleness in society in general and knowing the economic impact of that reaction. That attire, which was intended to convey coolness, only heightened the distrust and fear of Black young men, especially in those first five years that it was out.
The result however has been that people now see just how goofy the entire labeling of Black youth is, because of witnessing their own silly kids trying to be cool in the same way, when two years back they were into Santa and "nite nite" stories. I believe that the result is a humanizing of Black boys.