Florida state Senator Gary Siplin is making sure students comply with the new law banning sagging pants on school campuses. Sipling welcomed mostly male students back to school by handing out free leather belts.
While the innocuous, hollow gesture may help black teens stay in compliance, it will do little to solve the problems plaguing young African Americans, particularly males.
Siplin campaigned for six years on the “Pull Your Pants Up” law, which was passed by an overwhelming vote in the state legislature. The law was to take effect at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school season. Arkansas is the only other state to make pants that hover below the waist, exposing underwear, a crime.
“We want our kids to believe they’re going to college, and part of that is an attitude, and part of that is being dressed professionally,” Siplin told Reuters.
Siplin said he used to sport an Afro and platform shoes from his teen years during the disco era, but has tired of seeing young men, particularly blacks and Latinos, exposing their underwear because their pants were worn so low off the waist.
According to reports, Siplin tried mightily to criminalize saggy pants, but the law instead subjects offenders to up to three days of in-school suspension and up to 30 days’ suspension from extracurricular activities. The law also disallows low-cut and midriff-exposing shirts on girls.
While understanding that low-hanging pants constitutes major eye pollution, Siplin and his Florida colleagues could have appropriated their energies on a measure that could have a real long-lasting positive impact: With the U.S. Department of Labor reporting that upwards of 50 percent of black youth are unemployed in this country, Siplin could have — and still can — use the same energies on job creation that would do much to occupy the time for oft-impulsive, high-energy teens.
This measure may have scored Siplin some political points and got him some media shine, but the only thing it accomplishes is incur the resentment of teens who see through such acts as political posturing that provide no solution to the myriad of problems they encounter on a daily basis. –terry shropshire
