Word.ws English Dictionary

pull up your pants

pull up your pants phrase: a reference to respectability politics, especially with regard to African-Americans.

Phrase

pull up your pants

  1. (US, attributive, informal) A reference to respectability politics, especially with regard to African-Americans.
    • 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 [...]2014 August 4, Gene Demby, “'Are You, Like, African-AMERICAN Or AFRICAN-American?'”, in NPR, archived from the original on 13 Aug 2015
    • 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...2020 June 12, “I Am Not Your Negro review: race, rage and the American Dream”, in Sight and Sound, archived from the original on 24 Jun 2020
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see pull up, pants.

Origin of pull up your pants

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

Questions about pull up your pants

What does pull up your pants mean?
Pull up your pants means a reference to respectability politics, especially with regard to African-Americans.
What part of speech is pull up your pants?
Pull up your pants is a phrase.

Words near pull up your pants in the dictionary

  1. pull up short
  2. pull up stakes
  3. pull up stumps
  4. pull up the drawbridge
  5. pull up the ladder
  6. pull up your pants
  7. pull'd
  8. pull-apart
  9. pull-aparts
  10. pull-back
  11. pull-backs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pull up your pants (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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