By Siphokazi Magadla
Saggy pants is a popular form of displaying rebellion to teenage respectability by young men who wear their trousers far down their waists, often times generously exposing their underwear. Saggy pants are mostly associated with black male masculinity, which has been highlighted by the imagery often associated with mainstream hip-hop culture. Of course today this phenomenon is no longer the privilege of young black lads as many white boys in my classrooms and elsewhere subscribe to the ”sagging” pants phenomenon. Yet, nevertheless, sagging pants are historically linked to black male adolescence. Like many black sisters and mothers I had been particularly averse to my two brothers engaging in these displays as I unconsciously saw them as yet another easy way black men attract negative attention (read racism and police brutality) to themselves. I have however shifted in this view.
In an interview on her brilliant book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa Harris-Perry shows the intersection between the language embedded in racism and sexism. She critiques the frequently held view that young African-American men can escape the brunt of racism by pulling their pants up and dressing up like ”respectable” men, forgetting of course that many black men who grew up under Jim Crow had worn their pants properly, but even that could not rescue them from the violence of racism in the US. Hearing Harris-Perry making this case I could not help but also be reminded of the fact that the founders of the African National Congress in 1912, the likes of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, John Dube and Sol Plaatje and the generation of Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo were by all means, very respectable men who would never be caught wearing their trousers as if they were auditioning for a hip-hop video. Yet what connects them to their African-American counterparts working in the plantations of the US south is that their efforts at aesthetic respectability could also not rescue them from the violence of the racism of apartheid!
I have been thinking about my brother’s saggy trousers because I have been failing to articulate the very problematic language that continues to frame South Africa’s rape culture. Eusebius McKaiser in his ambitious and timely book A Bantu in my Bathroom reminds us that indeed race and gender are curious cousins that offer us interesting parallels on how to understand the ill logic of both sexism and racism. I have thought of this more and more in the past weeks as those of us in the small town of Grahamstown grapple with the tragic gang rape and murder of Thandiswa Qubuda of Hlalani township. The questions that were first asked about the circumstances of this crime centred on what time she was walking and how come she was not cautious enough not to walk around at 2am as a woman in a dangerous township. These questions have come to be as predictable as they are boring. Just like the narrative of the events of that fateful January morning in Hlalani are already indicating that this is most likely a case of another woman who has yet again been betrayed by people she knew, not strangers.
Those of us who attended the memorial service were all too awake to this prevailing victim-blaming culture that underscores the reaction to rape in this country, which most certainly informed the appalling response of the police who were called to come for Thandiswa at 2am but arrived at 6am to the crime scene. This is despite the police station being a mere 2km from the crime scene. The pervasive lack of reflection on the impossibility of individual women to act themselves out of rape is particularly tragic in this country where we should simply know better if we take our history seriously.
The view that a black person under apartheid could, if they abide by the madness of apartheid rules, be able to escape it, is not only absurd but would have been a gross misunderstanding of the workings of that system. Yet today in this country we move from a view that women can manage the war on their bodies by staying clear of the places that are populated by these violent men. We continue to believe despite ample evidence to the contrary that these violent ”beasts” are nothing but aliens who otherwise visit our neatly organised society from time to time. McKaiser reminds us that this is another flawed manner in which we continue to deal with racism in this country because instead of addressing the many ways we continue to harbour racist views of each other (revealed mostly in the privacy of our homes), as a nation we are quick to exile those who dare bring their racism to our public spaces into the Siberia of racists who are nothing but a reminder of a distant past instead addressing the reality that our day-to-day lives reproduce a racist culture.
In cataloguing the shame that is caused by the stereotypes surrounding the imagery of black women in the US, Harris-Perry draws on WEB Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk to argue that to view citizenship in America today from the eyes of the black woman is to essentially ask the same question that Du Bois asked in 1903: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
We do this too with rape in this country where we have refused to be alive to the reality that the collective punishment of apartheid simply meant that any black person was fair game to the brutality of the police whether in the public or private space. We refuse to see how rape translates to being a similar collective punishment for women everywhere, in public and in private.
Just like young (black) men wearing saggy pants are often judged harshly, to me our framing of the current war on the bodies of South African women frames all South African women as problems.
Questions such as the dress code of women who have been raped perpetuates the victim blaming of women and ignores a larger system of patriarchal male dominance that allows rape culture to continue. As a country we have not been able to appreciate the parallels between different forms of oppression. This demonstrates the fact that we are a country that thrives on dangerous levels of short-term memory.
Siphokazi Magadla is a lecturer with the politics and international studies department at Rhodes University.
Sipokhazi, in any country where the president and many others thinks a man is worth five woman you are going to have an uphill battle with a rape culture.
well-argued and well-written. Thanks.
I am sure your brother is quite happy with your change of opinion.
Never judge a book by it’s cover, sure, I get it. Your brother may be a helll of a nice guy that looks like he crapped in his pants. Don’t get me wrong, the fashion of my day made me look like a real idiot too, and I was also part of a misunderstood generation.
Although I have to say hip-hop popularising terms like “ho’s” and “biatches” is not exactly helping some men respect women, and I do not think it helps some women respect themselves. With both of these ever widening trends, understanding whether the “biatch” actually wants it or not becomes ever harder to do, especially for our friends with saggy asses.
So, I am not sure why you have stopped complaining about your brother’s love for the genre, after all, all the money he spends on it, and all the time spent popularising it means that the next generation, in their search for the next big thing, to be more rich and more famous, will have to be more disrespectful, and more siinister, to ensure that they can sway the masses onto their craze…
But what do I know, I am old and unfashionable.
People dress in a certain way because they like what it represents. Observers will then treat them in a certain way. You want respect then dress accordingly.
Please don’t compare these attention seeking “victims of society” with real victims i.e. rape survivors!
Do I judge a book by its cover? Unfortunately, yes! I would never hire anyone who is unable to buy the correct size clothes or know how to wear them.
LOL.. quite by accident, I just read that wearing pants halfway down your butt started in American prisons where the inmates used this to indicate their availability for sex!
Oh yeah, that’s the way to show your rebelliousness… LOL!
@ Mr. Direct: Your comment reminded me of something Denis Leary once said about bell bottoms: “There we were in the middle of a sexual revolution wearing clothes that guaranteed we wouldn’t get laid.”
superman wore his underwear right over his pants, and he got approval from society. but nobody put their own underwear over their pants at work, did they? even though it looks fairly neat and tidy… just what hip-hop isn’t. nor does hip-hop care what you think of how it dresses. the more annoyed it makes people, the more it has succeeded. hip-hop is a movement – a rebellion, described in rhyming couplets, with underwear exposed. sometimes it has something interesting to say, usually it’s the same ‘look at my biatches, look at my car, look at my dick, look at my pool party, look at me perpetuating sexism and racism, look at me taking drugs, etc, etc.’ moaning about hip-hop is the worst possible response. until hip-hop is proven to be hate-speech and/or public indecency, don’t expect anything to change, whether you like it or not. you can’t beat ‘em… so join ‘em. when somebody, a living respecting human being makes in-exposed underwear cooler than exposed, only then will things change.
Thank you for your comments. Perhaps I will expand more on why I find this analogy of saggy pants a useful lens in which we can be able prove arguments of both racism and sexism to be nothing but a flawed distraction to our ability to address structural racism and sexism. For if logic follows that the young black men of today should not be surprised that police are hostile to them because they dress so ‘vulgar’, often resembling robbers and that their so called rebellion has little political content beyond allowing them to openly sexist, then it follows that this should make them more vulnerable to racial attacks. Yet historically we know that this is not true. Under Jim Crow you did not have plenty black men on our television screens exposing their underwear and calling women ‘biatches’ and ‘hos’, yet the racism under Jim Crow was far more appalling than today if we take blatant lynching of black men and other blatant forms of violence seriously. Therefore we can say that viewing racism from aesthetics is not a useful unit of analysis. Then something deeper is at play here.
Again, if we use the example of the 2009 arrest in broad daylight of the very respectable and well dress African American Professor Henry Louis Gates outside his home in Cambridge, we can again make the argument that racism does not happen to badly dressed people, it happened to Gates because he was a black. Period.
Furthermore, being honest about the fact that black men do not deserve the racism they face because of how they dress does not stop us from calling them out on the sexism they direct to women in their music and elsewhere. But to argue that their misogyny makes us understand why they face racism is a terrible way to account for the perseverance of racism.
This lens is useful to understanding the problematic nature of focusing on the way women are addressed when they are raped because it shows us that we are wasting valuable time telling women that they would be less vulnerable to rape if they stopped dressing like ‘sluts’. Yet again, if we look at the empirical workings of rape, we know that most rapes do not happen in the public space that is populated by people called prostitutes, but most rape happens in the home. Thus to continuously ask women to police themselves in terms of dress and where and what time they go, betrays the real workings of rape. To say that Thandiswa should not have been out at night dressed in a particular way does not help us to understand the rape of people like the then nine month year old “Baby Tshepang” by her mother’s boyfriend back in 2001, one of our more infamous cases of baby rape in this country. To assume that women can manage the circumstances of their rape diverts attention from examining how our social arrangements allow for the occurrence of rape.
In the same way that accusing black boys like Trayvon Martin to be responsible for the circumstances of their murder, takes attention away from the power dynamics at play. The fact being that it was not Trayvon’s ‘hoody’ that made him vulnerable to being shot, but his blackness. This is the same way that Henry Louis Gates like all black people, in spite of their social achievements and dress code, has a greater propensity to face racism. We can say that the difference between Gates and Trayvon was that the latter was shot at night because he looked ‘suspicious’, but then again, Gates was arrested in his house looking ‘proper’ in broad daylight.
Thus its unhelpful to say that black people are less prone to racism in particular places and times of the day, in the same light that we should say that women are more prone to rape in particular places, looking a particular way and at particular times. All of this delays us from really examining how power relations that are embedded in our social relations provide the core foundation for racialised oppression and gender oppression. Unless those racial and gender relations change, we will forever be making excuses for racists and rapists.
MMmm. You do know where the idiotic fashion of wearing your pants around your knees originated, I hope – from the holding cells of police stations.
When they take your belt and shoelaces away, you end up looking like these losers.
Good golly, Siphokazi, Seldom have I seen so tortuous a line of argument from someone not obsessed with a hobby-horse. Linking racism and sexism to a sloppy dress code (that is reprehensible if only because it would surely place the ill-dressed at a disadvantage in a fight-or-flight situation), is a far stretch indeed, and a generalisation. And then you go further and demonstrate why the unnamed people you accuse of making this link are wrong. Ever heard of a straw-man argument?
You have inspired me to emulation. Let’s see, here goes: Clerics go around in long flowing robes, like dresses, and probably don’t wear underpants underneath. This is why they are all paederasts. But no, this can’t be right because Muslims and Scotsmen are not overly known for paederasty. And moreover there are paederasts who dress normally. How’s that?
Talking of stereotypes, I have heard of sagging pants referred to as “plumber’s cleavage” (use your imagination) by no means a reference to hip-hop or black wearers.
There are other aspects to young blacks dressing so:
• Peer culture and generation gaps – in the 60′s this was expressed by jeans and long hair.
• Rejection of societal rejection. I was explained to me that the “punks” in the UK wore purple hair, safety pins though their cheeks, etc as an “in your face” rejection of society because, they moment they spoke with the wrong accent they’d lost the job interview, anyway (these were white kids, by the way, but still suffering from class stereotypes)
Maybe young blacks are not so different after all.
rebellion against who? the state or white people ,i lost your link of baggy pants and social anti women stereotypes,bggy clothes in this country is a not a form of rebellion my dear,it is a an expression of moral carelessness and a show off of bravery against the law ,it is a prison culture normalised into black life through mass media ,remember the midninties kwaito subculture in black township which preceded the present hip hop madness posting gangsters as role models a la TUPAC SHAKUR, i had my pants below my waist 15 years ago, at high school,but for my son ,not in my HOUSE not in my SIGHT.
sad from truth the similar mentality of baggy pants,descend dangerous rape justifying beliefs like proving manhood by bedding more women than your peers.The sooner black people stop forcing race it every social hole the better .dress codes are crucial not in explaining true character but dress codes do tell what the subject passes off as his or her character
michael #
It’s unfortunate that you couldn’t resist to make a random inane statement as your contribution to a blog about stereotyping people. Has it crossed your mind that Zuma’s wives are human beings too who made a choice that you disapprove of? Me thinks you should start by respecting those women’s choice before you point fingers.
Sipho, you say in the last paragraph ” ignores a lager system of patriarchal male dominance that allows rape culture to continue”. Any male that thinks that he can love, nurture and care for five wives and twenty one children is super human and should be cloned.My view is that many social ills stem from bad parental care.You obviously condone this behaviour of the first citizen of SA.I find it demeaning and would feel exactly the same if he was white or any hue.Further the choice his wives made reinforces the patriarchal nature of the arrangement but that was furthest from their minds, they were after the money, power and prestige.Sipho as much as i would like to be proud of the President i cannot and see him as part of the problem.
I just had a 20-year old white kid working for me in my IT business. One of the reasons i fired him after 3 weeks is because I’m tired of seeing his crack all the time… do I really have to pay someone to see his crack!!!???