[

Baggy pants laws may do some good

 Pine Lawn, Mo joined cities that ban baggy, low-slung pants. Low-slung pants often slip down and expose the young male’s underwear or the body parts underwear should cover.  This undignified style disgusts many people although the young males who wear it believe it makes them special.  

Critics of the baggy pants laws complain the government is attacking youthful fashion. Specifically, they argue those laws single out fashion popular with young black men and their hip-hop culture.  However, they omit that Pine Lawn, Mo. that recently passed this type law reports the city demographically as 98 percent black.  Reportedly, Benjamin Chavis, head of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network said his coalition would challenge the laws. Will they do it to protect the rights of some black-labeled young men or to benefit of the Hip Hop entertainment industry?  

I find the low-slung pants style increasingly disgusting, because of the dysfunctional thinking it suggests and not because of exposed body parts. Mooning—someone pulling down his or her pants intentionally to show his or her buttocks—has long been a disgusting American tradition. College students do it. Movie scenes include it. San Juan Capistrano, CA has a 28-year annual ritual of mooning Amtrak trains.

So far, the courts defended mooning as a protected First Amendment Free Speech Right.  Probably, they will make a similar ruling about baggy pants. However, the difference is that the people who moon do not confuse their silly act as a part of their self-image. The baggy pants crowd makes their outfit a full-time cultural expression.   

Minors do not have a free speech right to wear low-slung pants. Their parents have responsibility for their style of dress. It offends reason to conclude that minors without responsibility for their actions enjoy free speech rights to express their individuality. It offends reason more to believe young people on this earth fewer than twenty years decide an alleged racial culture.  

The bizarre style of dress dramatizes the loss of parental control over many young men. In addition, it shows the self-destructive direction immature thinking takes absent proper guidance. Black-labeled young males suffer a high potential for bad outcomes in American society more inclined to fear and destroy them, rather than educate and include them.  They engage in social suicide when they encourage this stereotype by selecting a dress style that makes them appear more menacing.

Hip-hop music and baggy pants would be fine if limited to recreational pursuits.  It becomes dangerous to the young people when they believe if defines them and their culture. It exhilarates young people when many adults credit their music and lyrics with defining a racial culture.

Supporters of hip-hop claim those young musicians tell it like it is. I am sure they do, from their limited experience. We expect teenagers to believe they discovered the secrets for running the world that their parents missed. Didn’t we suspect our genius over our dull parents at one time?  Nevertheless, deep down, we knew our parents were taking on the difficult assignments and making the hard decisions about life we were not ready to make.  Somehow, many black-labeled people and their leaders who should know better, credit hip-hop as black culture’s salvation.  

I do not listen to hip-hop. Does telling it like it is in the neighborhood include reporting the reasons it is as it is? Do the rap lyrics report that schools are bad because of government neglect, parents’ neglect and students’ neglect? Do hip-hop lyrics report how successfully well-disciplined classes of students learn in large class from average teachers, but classes of twenty undisciplined students fail instruction from the most talented teachers? Do the lyrics report how fathers failing to support their children harm them and the neighborhood more than bad police officers and misinformed social workers?

Hip-hop and folk music from the sixties tell the emotional story of society’s problems, but only superficially.   Do hip-hop lyrics tell young people that working within the system helps change how it is—Attorney  Thurgood Marshall worked within the legal system to overturn school segregation laws—while protests and song only tell it like it is over and over and over until people in the system change how it is. 

It is good that communities started to show disapproval for the bizarre dress so many black-labeled young males adopted. Those young males will benefit from this action, because it will help to clear their delusion that this dress style and this attitude strengthen their male image in society.  Maybe they will learn earlier they gain respect as men by acting responsibly and not from affectation. 

Contact Kenneth Brooks at P.O. B 882, Vallejo, CA 94590