I am in NC today for a speech to a student group. I try very hard not to belittle people’s social concerns. But honestly, this is way too much for me.

A couple in North Carolina is launching a social movement against young people wearing sagging pants. This comes on the heels of a man who shot a teenager in the rear for wearing sagging pants.

Every article that discusses the issue of this youth fashion expression mentions that sagging pants are somehow linked to prison culture.

Sagging has its roots in prison culture; prisoners weren’t allowed to wear belts, so their pants sagged, according to Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. As hip-hop culture grew in the past 15 to 20 years, it absorbed elements of the prison culture, including sagging pants, Neal has said.

Quoting from the article about the march against sagging pants:

On Saturday, they’re hoping to make a more public statement, with a protest march — “The Walk to End Saggin’” at the East Winston Shopping Center.

“We’re just trying to get the message out that we want them to stop this sagging,” Gwen Rasheed said this week. “I think we have a responsibility to help these children.”

Rasheed said teens who wear sagging pants are not taken seriously by teachers or potential employers, and that can prevent young people from becoming productive adults.

Honestly, I just can’t take this seriously. If the biggest problem that we are facing with young people is that they are wearing sagging pants well then we have NO problems. We all know that young people are living with an inordinate amount of oppression and violence in their lives. Sagging pants are just not a major social problem. The article references the fact that several municipalities have considered ordinances against sagging pants attempting to further criminalize young people and their behaviors. Those efforts have proven largely to be failures. Thank God!

The Rasheeds say they don’t plan to ask the Winston-Salem City Council for a law banning sagging pants, as several eastern Winston-Salem activists did in 2008. An ordinance could lead to police records and fines, Gwen Rasheed said, and that wouldn’t help the offending kids.

In other cities around the country, ordinances barring sagging pants have met with resistance.

In September, a judge in Palm Beach Circuit Court ruled that such an ordinance in Riviera Beach, Fla., was unconstitutional, after a teenager was arrested and held in jail under the law.

Last week, the city council in Cocoa, Fla., considered a similar ordinance but decided not to vote on it.

The Winston-Salem ordinance proposed by citizens in 2008 received little support from the council; no council member ever proposed it for a vote, and the matter fizzled out by the end of the year.