Metro

Give ’em a kick in the saggy pants

State Sen. Eric Adams (D-Queens), a former NYPD cop who was
raised in South Jamaica, Queens, thinks it’s high time for city students to lift their saggy pants.
He is
now lobbying Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to adopt a resolution banning sagging pants in classrooms.

When I was overseas, I noticed people were sagging there. You know, as New York goes, so goes America, and as America goes, so goes the world. We want to be identified globally by our great achievements — hot dogs, Chevrolet, baseball . . . not showing our underwear.

It dawned on me that this dress standard has been around for 30 years. Many children grew up in it. If no one is saying it’s wrong, how do they know it’s wrong?

Where do children learn social norms? Either at home or in the school setting. Home failed because many of the parents were sagging. So, in order to break the chain, I felt we had to go to the schools.

In school, we learn that we don’t yell out, we wait. You raise your hand and wait for your chance. School is more than ABCs and 123s. It’s the beginning of developing how to interact in a social setting. When you walk through the halls of our schools, you see children showing their behind, the cracks of their behind, their underwear, young girls showing their G-strings. And the institution that’s supposed to be responsible for developing well-rounded young people is not stopping it.

The communities I represent are ground zero for sagging. Some people may think, What’s the big deal? But it’s more than someone not wearing a belt on their pants. It is symbolic of the erosion of basic, normal decency. People shouldn’t be displaying their pubic hairs. That is not normal, acceptable behavior in young people that we are grooming to be in a professional environment. You can’t dress the same on the corner as you can in corporate America — you’ll be unemployed.

My son is a very bright, “A”-student 16-year-old filmmaker, but he’s influenced by his peers. He was sagging, and I corrected him. That doesn’t mean he won’t go around the corner and sag again, but that’s fine.

At least he’ll be able to say one day, “Dad, now I know what you were talking about.” He needs to know there are rules.

Young people have always established themselves in an anti-establishment way — I don’t care if it’s wearing long hair, wearing bell bottoms, wearing miniskirts. But there was always an adult that said, “Cut your hair, make that skirt longer.” There was always a way to correct it, and that’s the role of our schools.

This is the broken window of social behavior — when you ignore people walking the streets showing their ass. The chancellor has a wide range of authority and power to ensure compliance in a normal school atmosphere. I cornered Chancellor Walcott at Medgar Evers College over the summer, and he said, “Eric, let me look into the legality of it.”

Leadership starts at the top. Mayor Bloomberg made a comment one day — I think he said we shouldn’t be the dress-code police. I think he missed the boat. He’s so far up in the building that he doesn’t realize what those broken windows are doing on the first floor.

In the society he hangs out in, they don’t sag. They laugh at people that sag. And they just say, “Those are the people we’ll never hire, who will never date our children.” In the universe that he lives in, sagging is not an issue. Would he hire someone that comes in the building sagging? Would he employ them to run his corporation? Would he bring them into City Hall?

It’s tolerable to him because he’s removed from that universe.