Sagging Your Pants? Risk a Fine Or Jail Time

Beginning mid-way in September, the law in Mansfield, Louisiana are imposing a city-dress code that prohibits the sagging of pants. Pant-saggers can be fined $150 (plus court costs) or be thrown into jail up to 15 days. Seriously?

The logic of the rule, is "race-blind" and relying on standards of "decency," regardless of the fact that purveyors of the style are black men. In the West Ward of Trenton, Councilwoman Annette Lartigue is drafting an ordinance to fine or enforce community service to curb this national epidemic. She said,

"It's a fad like hot pants; however, I think it crosses the line when a person shows their backside. You can't legislate how people dress, but you can legislate when people begin to become indecent by their body parts."

Has she actually seen anyone wear sagging jeans? There's pretty clearly no actual skin exposure involved, and certainly nothing vaguely comparable to hot pants. Moral decency isn't really the issue here. Essentially, lawmakers are trying to control a group they see as "threatening" -- young, black men. Since people are more likely to believe that black men committed violent crimes (whether they did it or not is unimportant), it now follows that we should simply outlaw whatever it is that black men do that's too, you know, black. This law comes out of a long, line of post-Civil Rights era impositions that weren't outright racist against people of color, but were instead used to restrict or stop their actions. For example, New York courts defended American Airlines' sacking of a black woman for wearing cornrows because the policy was supposedly banning a hairstyle, not an identity. Black people are still allowed to work there; they just have to be black people that look more like white people.

I’m not suggesting that there is an “authentic” black identity. The fact of the matter is that there is a great diversity in the way blackness manifests itself, and none are necessarily better than another. But each image carries political and historical value -- some which challenge the mainstream, and others that conform to it. Sagging pants, do-rags, and a gangsta limp reject assimilation, and the supposed superiority of the dominant group. It’s a simple, yet worthy form of resistance. Maybe that’s why lawmakers are so keen to quell it.