Monty on “Wacky Tacky Day” in 2014 and 2017
Monty rushed home on Tuesday evening and went straight to his bedroom on a mission to find the most absurd combination of clothing he could wear for school on Wednesday.
My 9-year-old third grader left the house yesterday wearing a black sneaker on one foot and a red Cars slipper on the other; a backwards Cleveland Cavaliers jersey; a black corduroy blazer; and blue basketball shorts.
Some D.C. natives would call him a bama (or bamma depending on where you fall in the spelling debate)—and that’s the point.
Monty was celebrating what KIPP Public Charter Schools dub “Wacky Tacky Day,” according to spokesperson Adam Rupe.
The tradition has been part of the D.C. Public School system for at least as far back as I attended in the 1990s and 2000s, though we called it “Bama Day” and most schools that participate still do.
KIPP prefers not to use the term “bama” because it may “confuse or alienate students,” Rupe says.
For those who haven’t lived in the District long enough to have heard the term, “bama” is used in the region to deride a distinctly unfashionable person—often in terms of what they’re wearing, but just as frequently, their behavior. Urban Dictionary says it describes someone “who has no style, taste, or class.” In an explanatory Washington City Paper story, they write: ” ’Bama is just another way of calling someone out; a ’Bama is a fool, a punk, a herb, someone who simply doesn’t get it.”
My dad says even back in the ‘70s, the term was negative, almost like someone was cursing at you.
But yesterday morning, Monty and his peers knowingly walked into the Southeast elementary school in mismatched attire—stripes, polka dots, neon colors—to carry out a tradition that his parents admittedly weren’t brave enough to engage in back when we were in school.
“I get to relive it vicariously through Monty,” his dad told me. “I feel it’s a great opportunity for kids to express not only their creativity but also their uniqueness and individuality. No worries about societal norms or judgement, it’s all love, as it should be.”
Alicia Griffin, my best friend from Ron Brown Middle School (now an all-boys high school in Deanwood), says she “can remember vividly the days” when she attended H. D. Woodson High School.
She recalls male students wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys and sagging their pants because “on a normal day, you’d be belted up.”
And while the term typically has a negative connotation, Griffin says she didn’t laugh at her peers. “I saw them as expressing their opinion through dress about sports.” And she was right alongside them wearing mixed patterns and “wrong sequences.”
My cousin Tiffany Smith, who attended Woodson as a 9th grader, remembers wearing knee-high mixed match socks, shorts, suspenders, and a Cat in the Hat hat. But rest assured, she and her friends “still managed to make it look good.”
Smith said the tradition continued when she left Woodson to attend a school in Prince George’s County, Maryland (here’s a video from “Bamma Day” at an Oxon Hill school); and she now dresses her two daughters for the occasion at their D.C. charter schools.
Vin Testa and fellow teachers dressed up for Bama Day at Theodore Roosevelt High School.
Bama Day is typically celebrated during a school’s “spirit week.” Students at Monty’s school participated in “Sports Day” on Monday and “Twin Day” on Tuesday. Today, they’re wearing animal prints and tomorrow they’ll be decked out in college gear.
KIPP spokesperson Rupe says spirit week is happening now because after next week’s spring break, students will take the PARCC exams. So it “helps our students get excited leading up” to the tests.
For most other schools, spirit week and Bama Day comes in the fall, around Homecoming time.
Griffin says spirit week, and Bama Day in particular, “caused people to interact with each other” at Woodson. “You couldn’t help it—maybe even with someone who you wouldn’t normally speak to.” She describes it as “forced friendships in a positive light.”
The term “bama” was also an eye opening experience for Vin Testa, a Connecticut transplant who’s taught in D.C. public schools for the past six years.
“I was called a bama during my first year of teaching because I wore socks with sandals one time,” he says, adding that he never did it again.
Since then, he’s fully embraced Bama Day at Roosevelt and Eastern high schools with colleagues who he says probably go more “overboard” than the students because most teachers drive and don’t have to be seen on the Metro dressed like bamas.
