By Mansfield Frazier
Eureka! I’ve found it. I’ve come up with a cure for one of the most dreaded, noxious syndromes to ever plague the nationwide black community … one that, increasingly over the years, has even leaped the narrowing racial/cultural divide and begun spreading like a creeping, nasty viral infestation among a select group of young whites as well. It’s insidious.
What, you thought problems that infect the black community are forever going to stay bottled up in our nation’s inner cities? Well, that’s pretty silly of you.
This plague, which is now entering its second — or is it third? — decade, is particularly noxious, and has caused widespread consternation (not to mention acute embarrassment) among older and more sane black folk due to its rampant, allopatric, rate of occurrence. We’ve virtually lost a generation to it.
Everyone — from preachers to politicians to pundits — has all railed against it loud and long, but alas, to no effect. It just keeps on keeping on, being passed down from one generation of blacks to the next, like some sort of demented sickle cell trait; like low aspirations; like even lower high school test scores.
But now, finally, at last, there’s a cure … and I’ve come up with it. After conducting an extensive, empirical, double blind study on a random sampling and diligently analyzing the results, I can conclusively state that my findings are nothing short of phenomenal.
One day, statues of me will be erected in black neighborhoods all across the land for my groundbreaking work in this field. Schools and buildings will bear my name. I might even be awarded one of those half-million dollar McArthur Genius Grants.
OK, I’ve toyed with you long enough. While I haven’t discovered a cure for cancer or anything like that, to the black community it’s almost as important: I’ve come up with the cure for “Sagging Pants Syndrome.”
Go ahead, get your laugh off, but us black folk have been laughing to keep from crying over this foolish fashion for over 20 years now: Little hood rats (many now fully grown men) struggling to walk around holding their pants up with one hand … usually while holding a cell phone with the other. Some of these dudes are so stupid they don’t have sense enough to tighten their belts (if, indeed, they are in possession of one) before trying to run away from a failed carjacking. Little old ladies can outrun them.
Like many other amazing cures, I came upon this one quite by accident. The young men that we hire to work in our vineyards and construction projects (the vast majority of whom are recently released from prison) all were infected by the syndrome … sadly, they are were “saggers.” (To find a cure for a problem you first have to give it a name, which I did.)
I patently explained to them the difficulty (and danger, especially when doing construction work) of attempting to accomplish anything with your hands while having to constantly use one of them to keep your pants from falling off your ass. I pay them well above minimum wage, but couldn’t get full productivity out of them because one of their hands was in almost constant use doing something nonproductive.
When the explanations didn’t work (and after I bought some cheap belts that didn’t seem to work either because they obviously didn’t know how to use them), I began to threaten to send them back home, explaining that I wasn’t about to get in trouble with OSHA by allowing unsafe working conditions. But that only worked to a partial degree.
Then it hit me. I established rules on what was allowable to wear to work: I required them to wear bib overalls. Yep, bib overalls. Try as they might, there’s simply no way the little fuckers could let those sag off their asses. Impossible. Problem solved.
Soon, the garments became a fashion and status statement around our part of the ‘hood. Wearing them meant they had a job, they were working and making some money; before long the young ladies in the community started showing increased interest in them (in spite of the fact a couple of them are as ugly as homemade sin).
Hey, at the end of the week they had a few nickels to rub together, and they didn’t have to risk getting a cap busted in their butt to acquire them. They could afford to take a date to the movie and no one was going to die, except on the screen. The young ladies particularly liked that part.
Now, this “cure” can fairly easily be replicated across the country. All it would take for this to spread like wildfire is to convince a number of hip hop icons — perhaps like rappers “Lil” Wayne, 50 Cents, Kanye, and a few others — to begin sporting bib overalls in their videos and stage appearances — hell, pay them to wear them if necessary. Have some hot young black designer slap their name on a pair of jazzed up bibs; make them in a variety of colors and patterns.
In a New York minute they could become as hot a fashion statement as Air Jordan’s. The back of this ugly syndrome will once and for all be broken … and Sagging Pants Syndrome will — thankfully, at long last — become a silly fad of the distant past.
Well, at least we can hope, can’t we?
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.