pull up your pants

English

A reference to sagging among African-Americans, and its associated moral panic.

(US, informal, attributive) A reference to respectability politics, especially with regard to African-Americans.
- 2014 August 4, Gene Demby, “'Are You, Like, African-AMERICAN Or AFRICAN-American?'”, in NPR‎^[1], archived from the original on 2015-08-13:
  Over at NewsOne, Donovan X. Ramsey contrasted two approaches President Obama has taken with black audiences: 1) the finger-wagging, pull-up-your-pants approach that he often takes with African-Americans, like the graduates at all-male Morehouse College [...]
- 2020 June 12, “I Am Not Your Negro review: race, rage and the American Dream”, in Sight and Sound‎^[2], archived from the original on 2020-06-24:
  A particularly jarring instance is the pairing of a blasé industrial film titled The Land We Love (1966) with footage of the Watts riots in 1965, and seeing, in addition to the absence of black faces in the former, how the American Dream is a wonderful dream but is also used as a nightstick to beat those who have been systemically prevented from enjoying it. (See also: the ‘pull up your pants’/All Lives Matter crowd.)
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see pull up,‎ pants.