Pull up your da** pants! Parents, teachers, pastors and community leaders across the country are screaming at the top of their lungs. Municipalities that are firing teachers because they can’t afford to pay them are spending thousands to erect billboards to shout the message. I s it only me or does it strike anybody else as ludicrous that our communities, our leaders, have chosen our children’s underwear as a point of galvanization?
Okay, so there is no confusion, I don’t like the sagging pants style, but that’s what it is ya’ll, a style, and as such, it constitutes a pi** poor basis on which to judge our kids.
Several communities have taken their displeasure with underwear to the point of fratricide. No, I haven’t heard of a murder in the name of underwear outrage, yet, but there are cities large and small, from Florida to California that have made the style illegal. You heard me African American adults across the country have voted to incarcerate their sons for sagging pants. So you tell me, are our children really of so little
value to us we are ready to willingly sacrifice them to a system we know wants them dead over their underwear?
Okay, again, I know how it looks and I know where the style originates but WTF? Is our love and respect for our children really predicated on their drawers? And before you come with the buts and the finger pointing, let me remind you four of those fingers are pointing back at you, at us. A child’s failure to know is firmly rooted in a parent’s failure to teach.
Most of our kids can’t identify Paul Robeson or Phyllis Wheatley, don’t know George Jackson or the Afrika family. Our babies ain’t never heard of Fannie Lou or Edmund Pettus. We’re mad because they seem to be running every which way, but it was us who failed to give them any direction. Today there are 3 times as many African American sons, brothers, fathers between the ages of 18 – 25 enslaved by the penal system as there are enrolled in college. And we’re trippin over our babies’ underwear?
I say not just no, but ah he** no! This must stop now! Our children, our sons, are so much more than their underwear. It’s time to proclaim our children’s’ value from the rooftops. It’s time to encourage and support our kids in shouting their own value from the stars. It’s time to launch a counter offensive in the Underwear Wars and show the world, most particularly our children, just how precious and promising our babies, sagging pants and all, really are to us.
If you agree our children’s value far exceeds how they wear their pants… If you agree a belt is the least of what many of them lack and if you are dedicated to communicating to our youth and through our youth to the larger community that our kids value far exceeds their drawers, then join NUMN and Pillars of the Bridge tonight as we plan the counter offensive in the Underwear Wars.
7:30 PM EST Call in (712) 432-0600 Access Code: 990850#
Posted By: Michelle Diane
Sunday, January 17th 2010 at 5:49PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
