SAGGY PANTS AND THE NEW RACIAL DIVIDE

Stand with me in the 1970s. James Brown exhorted us to "Say it loud,
I'm black and I'm proud." The Afro hairstyle, made famous by Angela
Davis, and the dashiki tunic were the symbols of this pride. And they
were everywhere.

These choices in hair and clothing allowed us to express solidarity
with a social movement we called loosely, "the struggle." I still
remember my father's reaction to my Afro. His hair was curly, almost
straight, not kinky like mine. And he wore it short. "Boy, if my head
looked like yours, I would cut my whole head off!" What he meant was
that the keys to the kingdom, to success in corporate America was a
more conservative dress code.

Those days of Afros, dashikis and power signs are long gone. The
concept of "black identity" does not resonate the same way. But the
need of urban youth to express themselves is just as real. For the
civil rights generation, the issue was race, not class. Discrimination
in this Jim Crow era did not distinguish between a black engineer and
a black garbage collector. The problem of the 20th century was the
problem of the color line.

But this is the 21st century. In the aftermath of the civil rights
era, issues of race are more complex. The dividing line is less race
than it is the ZIP code you live in. We are, in the words of Henry
Louis Gates, two nations, both black. Those who live within the urban
space of the inner city have a completely different set of experiences
from their middle-class counterparts in the suburbs. The fact is that
in some cities over 30"percent of the youth are either in prison, on
parole or probation. This is sobering testimony to the impact of a
drug war which explicitly targeted drug trade in low-income areas. In
Florida in many inner-city schools the graduation rate hovers around
50'percent.

While men, particularly black men in the inner city, face
incarceration and poor job prospects, the black middle-class
experience is one of unprecedented opportunity.

It is against this background that we must consider the recent ban by
the Florida Senate on "saggy pants." This punishes students for
wearing saggy pants with suspension. Why? "You will not get a job with
underwear showing over your trousers," said sponsor Sen. Larcenia
Bullard, D-Miami. Underneath this paternalism is a Bill Cosby-like
notion that saggy pants are "thuggish," "indecent" and "juvenile."
This is a clash of cultures: a battle between hip-hop culture and the
black middle-class values that Sen. Bullard represents.

The hip-hoppers in their saggy pants are not the new "urban
primitives." They are intelligent young people who are making a
statement, expressing an "attitude." As Ice T stated, "I ain't no
Bryant Gumbel." The attitude is "I am ghetto-centric, not
Afro-centric." Incarceration is almost a routine experience in the
ghetto. The larger society stigmatizes those who went to prison. The
hip-hoppers have made of it a badge of manhood. Wearing saggy pants -
symbolic of having been inside - claims this authentic, hard, ghetto
manhood.

All this may offend. But it is fundamental of free speech that
offensiveness never justifies banning expression. The legislators who
passed the law against saggy pants were well-intentioned in their
paternalism. But they, like Bill Cosby, are trapped in the
contradictions of cultural relativity. They lack empathy, as well. It
comes down to this; Democracy exists to promote individual
self-government. In a democracy, individuals have a right to choose
clothing and lifestyles that express their sense of who they are.
Wearing saggy pants is for the hip-hop generation their equivalent of
our Afro or dashiki. These are their badges of solidarity and
self-expression. Self-expression cannot be made a crime.