Do we even need belts in Jiu-Jitsu? Or more specifically, do we need colored belts? As the legend goes, in the old days, you just had a white belt, and after about twenty years of training, your white belt would be so filthy as to appear black. So where did this color scheme for belts come from in the first place?

The idea for colored belts in Jiu-Jitsu seems to come from the Judo tradition. Back in the 1800’s someone decided a black belt would be a cool thing to wear and then later in the early 1900’s they added colored belts for those practitioners who had not yet attained the rank of black belt. And when Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu kicked off in popularity, they seemed to adopt a similar belt system. Let me make this disclaimer, I don’t really know where it all came from, and I don’t really care. The question that I am interested in today is, do we really need belt ranking? Wouldn’t we all be a bit better off with just white belts on?

To start with, colored belts and belt ranking is nothing more than a clever advertising scheme. Somebody realized that we really like measured progress towards a goal, and if we denoted that progress with bright colors, well then, WOW is all I have to say. But wouldn’t the world be better off and more egalitarian if we all just wore white belts? There would be no discrimination against lower belts. There would be no injured pride when someone got tapped by a lower belt. We wouldn’t be witnessing the environmental hording catastrophe that is unfolding every time someone gets a new belt and cant quite bear to throw out the old one.

And you would think that with a belt ranking system, there would be clear guidelines about what someone should be capable of with a belt of a certain color, but that is largely not the case. A blue belt in one gym isn’t the same as a blue belt in another gym. Are belts awarded with time served on the mats? Should they be given out based on competition success? Or should they be awarded on regular intervals as long as the student can pay the required $99.99 testing fee, Visa and Mastercard accepted. No, belt ranking is nothing more than pretty colors based on absolutely nothing. It is complete bull squash and we should do away with it altogether, and return the Jiu-Jitsu practitioners one and all, to white belts.

But if we don’t do that, and we are still giving out pretty colored belts, then I really want to get one, please.