Mom reckoned that the decline of middle-class morality began with declining public fashion, with allowing children to wear flip-flops and cut-off jeans to school. She didn't advocate uniforms or strict dress codes, but she thought that how you dressed inevitably told a lot about your character. Like everyone else in her generation, she believed in appropriate dress for specific occasions.
If she were still alive today she would be turning over in her grave, as Yogi Berra would put it, at the sight of the newspaper photographs of the Northwestern University women's lacrosse players showing up in flip-flops to meet the president at the White House, even if the flip-flops were decorated with sequins or rhinestones, as the expensive ones are.
But she would have been pleased a few days later when Mr. and Mrs. John Roberts were introduced at the White House with their children dressed "prim and proper." Their son, Jack, looked like a little man in a summer seersucker suit with saddle shoes. His older sister, Josie, was decked out in a pretty yellow dress with lace-trimmed ankle socks and black patent-leather Mary Janes. The Washington Post fashion writer mocked the children as "costumed," but Mom -- and a lot of other grown-up women -- would have questioned the upbringing of a critic who never learned that clothes can sometimes speak louder than words.
Pop culture appeals to the lowest common denominator, and the "bourgeois values" of the middle class are always "dissed." This poses a problem for young people, black or white. That's one reason why the Clinton years offended so many of us, including Democrats, and why we cheered the news that George W. Bush, like other presidents before him, always wore his jacket in the Oval Office. (It's easier for a man to keep his pants on when he's wearing a jacket.) Respect, after all, is contagious. The appeal to the lowest common denominator is particularly damaging to kids in a black ghetto, where everything bourgeois is part of the "acting white syndrome."
Rapheal Adams, an outspoken black radio talk-show host in Cincinnati, notes how such attitudes encourage dysfunctional behavior. "Anything of value, that's 'white,'" he tells City Journal magazine, published by the Manhattan Institute, in an issue focused on black culture. "Standing with your pregnant girlfriend, that's 'white.' Staying away from gangs, 'white.' Wearing pants where they're supposed to be -- on your waist -- 'white.' 'We wear our pants below our butt line.' It is so sick."