HOW WHITES PROLONGED SAGGING
Pull your pants up!
Was the mantra of white people in the 90s.
They were screaming at young black males for how we wore our pants and they were genuinely mad.
People invented the myth that sagging your pants came from prison culture and represented that an inmate was ready to be "penetrated".
But in reality, sagging came form the group Kris Kross.
The rap group from the early 90s scored a major hit with their song 'Jump'!
The duo wore their clothes backwards, baggy, and with their pants sagging.
Soon after their 'Jump' video was released, young black males began to copying that style.
But after a while, adolescents found that wearing clothes backwards felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unsustainable.
So we stopped wearing our clothes backwards. But kept the baggy style and more importantly the sagging pants.
To us, it was something new, fashionable and cool. The lower our pants, the baggier our clothes, the better.
To black youth, we saw it as a fashion statement.
But to white people. It was a declaration of war.
All fades die out.
Bellbottoms, cutting our jeans at the bottom, flannel jackets, jams (fluorescent shorts), shoulder pads, herringbone chains.
Styles go as quickly as they come.
Sagging would have been no different. Except for one thing.
We found out how mad it made white people.
The reaction from white people to sagging was intense to say the least.
White people took a personal offense to sagging.
During the 1990s, local politicians, school board members, and community leaders widely criticized sagging pants as a sign of disrespect, indecency, and a decline in public standards.
I would be walking down the street at the age of 14 and a car would pass and some white person would scream out "Pull up your pants!!"
You'd be surprised to know how many times that happened. Not just to me but to plenty of other black teens.
It got so bad that the vice principal at my school confronted me in the middle of a school day. Took me out of class and said I have to go home and change my pants.
He even gave me a ride home in his car. He didn't seem angry and he didn't lecture me that much. Although he could have at least removed the confederate seat cover from the cars back seat.
This was in the state of Kentucky mind you.
I got the message.
Teenagers treat doing things to piss off adults as a job. Their duty. Their purpose in life. Us gen Xers were no different.
Once we found out how angry sagging our pants made adults. We declared a war of our own.
I would be remiss not to mention their racial undertones was the foundation of their anger.
White teens sagged too but they received nowhere near the attention or vitriol that black teens got from white adults.
But we embraced their anger. We not only continued the trend but we became experts at it.
We could play full court basketball with our belt line below our cheeks.
We ran from cops without losing speed or missing a stride.
We did everything with our pants far below our wastes.
Plus, the girls didn't seem to mind it at all.
Back then, complaints from whites was not new to us. Blacks have long learned how not to allow their disdain for us and the things we do to interfere with our daily lives.
The more whites screamed at us to pull our pants up, the lower we wore them, and the longer the style lasted.
Every complaint, every rule whites made to combat the trend, only strengthened our resolve.
For years neither side let up. Blacks sagged. Whites complained.
By the mid 90s even older cats and grown black men were sagging.
By the time the 2000s came around the war was still going strong.
But gradually, by the 2010s the "Pull up your pants!" comments had become less and less.
It felt like White people finally realized sagging wasn't going anywhere and were slowly giving up.
But it did not have to go that way.
If whites had just kept their mouths shut the fade would have went just as fast as it came.
If whites really wanted to get rid of sagging, they should have pretended to like the trend. Moreover, if the people who complained about sagging started copying the fad themselves.
Blacks would have stopped sagging within weeks.
But instead. Whites chose to constantly complain. They complained on TV shows, radio shows, white comedians made jokes.
Their whining, yelling, criticisms, and tantrums only fueled us to keep the style going.
Even when newer fashions came, we still kept sagging as part of our repertoire.
We intentionally extended the time we wore our pants like that just to keep pissing off the white folks.
By then, over 20 years had gone by.
So, thank you white people, for your incessant caterwauling about something you had nothing to do with, did not come up with, your youths copied it, and did not harm you in anyway.
And thank you for causing a style (that we love) which would have come and gone in a few years, to last well over two decades.
The young still sag today. But its harder to do in skinny jeans. And it's not as low as we used to go.