Sagging pants are not a crime

WE ARE a group of individuals and organizations who have come together to reject an alarming new racial profiling campaign in Massachusetts. This past January, the Black Mental Health Alliance of Massachusetts (BMHAM) began running public service announcements in Boston citing the Massachusetts General Laws around "Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order" to target Black youth with up to $300 in fines, two years in county prison, or three years in state prison as punishment for sagging their pants. We do not expect any such charges to hold up in the courts.

This campaign is a racist one. The advertisements target Black and Brown youth for criminalization. The Black Mental Health Alliance says it plans to expand its campaign to predominantly Black and Latino populated cities like Brockton, Lawrence and Springfield. The videos do not depict any of the thousands of predominantly young white people who participate in activities like the annual Underwear Run at Northeastern University or the No Pants Subway Ride on the MBTA every winter. Presumably, white college students should not have their lives disrupted by two to three years in prison, because they have their whole lives ahead of them.

We refuse to accept that Black children's lives are worth less than the lives of other children, that young Black men and women cannot walk the streets without the fear of being racially profiled, stopped and frisked, arrested and thrown in prison, simply for the way they dress. It is also homophobic and demeaning to rape survivors to say that there is something to the way that one dresses that invites and justifies sexual violence. That mental health professionals would advance this argument in an interview with Fox News is unconscionable.

On its website, this recently constituted organization says it is "committed to improving the quality of mental health care among minorities and disadvantaged people." Why, then, is its first public campaign one of expanding mass incarceration in a state where "three strikes" is now codified into law and encouraging a climate where it is acceptable for the police to stop, harass and incarcerate Black and Brown men, ruining their lives and breaking families apart?

ACCORDING TO the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, African Americans are 20 percent more likely to report having serious psychological distress than non-Hispanic whites. Our communities are facing many deep crises. A "behavioral health issue" of clothing is not one of them.

Unemployment for Black youth stands at over 50 percent, while millions in state funding for youth jobs continue to be cut year after year in Massachusetts. One in 10 residents of Massachusetts suffers from food insecurity and relies on a food pantry, soup kitchen or shelter. A newly announced round of budget cuts will cut millions in state funding for Medicaid recipients, community residential services for the disabled and special education funding. Hundreds of homes across the state are still being foreclosed on every month. Our schools are overcrowded, and our streets are over-policed.

We have searched BMHAM's website to find any indication that the organization recognizes that it is these crises of poverty, unemployment, shrinking social services, violence, policing, incarceration and second-class citizenship that are contributing to the real public-health catastrophe in our communities. On this, the organization is silent.

Massachusetts is already one of 26 states with some of the harshest sentencing laws in the country, with juveniles still serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. BMHAM says that "African American audiences needed a video designed to unsettle our communities." In a state where African Americans represent only 6 percent of the population, but 32 percent of those incarcerated, why would an organization within the medical profession think it best to unsettle and disturb the community with threats of prison time?

BMHAM says it is just trying to start a conversation about community standards. But this conversation actually takes away from the important ones we need to be having, about why it has become so easy to demonize and criminalize our youth and offer little more than an early death or a life spent behind bars.

It has hardly been one year since 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down by racist vigilante George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla. The justification for the murder of Trayvon was that he looked suspicious, and that it was not racism, but his hoodie, that was responsible for his death. It was racism that killed Trayvon, never anything he was wearing. It is not sagging pants, hip hop, prisoners or LGBT people, that are responsible for the racism, poverty, police violence and mass incarceration system that continue to plague our communities and society.

We call on Dr. Omar Reid, president of BMHAM, Senior Vice President Todd Payton and Community Outreach Liaison Gloria Middleton to end this campaign that dangerously reproduces a racist culture of victim blaming and instead use their resources and funds to call for more good-paying jobs; more art, music and after-school programs in public schools; increased funding and treatment of mental illness and health care in the Black community; and an end to the pipeline that funnels our children at younger and younger ages from school into the prison system.

Signatories:
Black and Pink
Center for Church and Prison
Hispanic Black Gay Coalition
International Socialist Organization-Boston
NAACP-Boston
Students Against Mass Incarceration-Boston
Teacher Activist Group-Boston