Sagging Pants

01May09

Late last year a Palm Beach County circuit court judge ruled that a law banning sagging pants is unconstitutional after a Riviera Beach, Fla. teenager spent a night in jail on accusations he exposed too much of his underwear.
The ruling is another chapter to a simmering controversy spreading throughout much of the southern United States.
Cities from Atlanta to Dallas to Charlotte, NC as well as more than a dozen municipalities in Louisiana have proposed or passed ordinances banning sagging pants.

Seen by cultural historians as another way African-American youth culture has chosen to express its identity, the style is seen by others as being closely associated with criminal behavior. Civil liberties advocates see racial profiling in the bans.

Regardless of the style’s meaning, proponents of ordinances prohibiting sagging pants can expect to face a skeptical court when these laws are challenged on constitutional grounds.

Marjorie Esman, executive director of the Louisiana chapter of the American Civil Liberty Union, says, “These laws just don’t hold water. I don’t think any of these ordinances could stand any kind of scrutiny at the appellate level.”
The origins of the style are vague and steeped in mythology. A consensus has emerged however that wearing sagging, oversized pants originated from prison culture. Most say that prison-issued garb is many times ill-fitting and usually oversized. With the prohibition of belts to prevent hangings and beatings, the pants of inmates tended to sag below the waist—sometimes showing as much at four or five inches of underwear or more.

Grammy-award-winning rapper Killer Mike disputes these claims. In his 2006 song, “That’s Life,” Killer Mike raps, “we wear our mother f_____-ing pants big because our mother’s were too poor to buy our size . . . call it what it is n____, it’s poverty.”

Whatever its origin, hip-hop artists in the early 1990s, some who served time in jail, adopted the style as a signifier of street credibility. The style migrated from hip-hop culture in predominately African-American neighborhoods, to skateboard culture, to the suburbs and hallways of many high-schools.

Diana Baird N’Diaye, historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., says that individual expression, especially in dress, has always been an important part of the African-American experience. “In the 1930s we had zoot suits, in the 1970s there was the “Superfly” look with platform shoes and bell-bottoms—all outlaw looks that our parents’ hated.”

N’Diaye continues, “It’s also connected to the improvisation of dance and movement. If you think about the way people move, the pants become an accessory to the swagger. It changes the silhouette of the body.”
Zoot suits share much in common with the extra large, sagging pants favored by African-American males who want to suggest toughness and street credibility. Both can be seen as statements of defiance and both changed the shape of the body. In his biography, Malcolm X described the zoot suit as “a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic’s cell.”

Tom Rogers, historian of the African diaspora and assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, says that wearing pants that sag below the waist is a “symbol of opposition to the mainstream, a tiny f___- you to mainstream society.” Rogers says that any attempt to ban the style of dress is an attempt by town officials “to maintain existing power hierarchies.”

Despite the charges that the laws are racially motivated, many legal scholars oppose the ordinances on constitutional grounds. Most ordinances banning sagging pants do so citing obscenity laws. The U.S. Supreme Court has created very few categories of speech that are not protected—obscenity however, is one of them. If a town can assert that wearing sagging pants is obscene, it can legally ban them.

Esman of the ACLU dismisses the obscenity argument outright. “The problem is that obscenity is very narrowly defined legally. The law is clear that showing underwear is not obscene. What about plumbers, exotic dancers and jogging bras?” Esman argues that these ordinances would encompass a broad range of dress, criminalizing unintended forms of clothing and styles.

Ethan J. Leib, professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco says that courts “aren’t too enthusiastic about these types of ordinances.” He calls most of the laws “overbroad and vague, and so trammel upon some pretty basic freedoms our constitution provides for.”

As for the laws’ racial implications, Leib says that “it isn’t obvious that any particular minority community is being intentionally discriminated against, as whites, blacks and Asians all wear the garb.”

The style remains popular in the predominantly African-American Roxbury neighborhood in Boston. Just a few blocks away from where Malcolm X spent several years as a young adult, Hector Fuentes works the counter of his family’s business, the Fuentes Market and Liquor Store. He says he sees customers coming in and out of his store with sagging pants “every day all day.”

Fuentes, who says he has friends who wear their pants very low, is dressed in what could be considered baggy but not sagging jeans. “Some say it feels comfortable, I don’t think they know how dumb it looks. It’s just a style. From the rappers. But illegal? No. Why?”

Whether or not ordinances that ban sagging pants are discriminatory, irrelevant or an attempt to curb harmful activities related to the style of dress, Rogers of UNC, Charlotte says the whole idea of the laws is “absurd.”
He says, “The laws are ridiculous and hopelessly naïve because you can’t control meaning. What are you going to do, legislate all dissent from a culture? The historical record is pretty clear. It doesn’t work.”