Celebrating National Fist Bump Day!

TAN celebrates National Fist Bump Day on Slate: Black The Root today. Here's a teasing snippet:

... This mainstream outreach may seem warm and fuzzy now, but at the time, some writers wondered if white folks had even noticed the gesture. And oh, they did. (To the point of not even paying attention to the perhaps more dubious booty-love tap that followed right after.) For a fascinating few weeks, the fist bump, a functional, hyper-hygienic descendant of the handshake and high five, was the topic du jour around America's water coolers. First came the blogs and tabloids, both here and across the pond. Then came the satirical cover of The New Yorker depicting the first couple as a Muslim Constitution-burner and an Angela Davis wannabe. This controversial image inspired parodies of the parody. And of course, the conservative response to Hurricane Obama made the whole thing feel like a game of “telephone” gone wrong: Fox News host E.D. Hill asked on-air, with fevered eyes: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?”

So why take us back there? If anything, the fist-jab furor represented a profound moment in interracial misunderstanding. For blacks, the salutation was nothing new. We wondered, were white folks really so ignorant, our worlds so segregated, that they couldn’t tell what a good old-fashioned dap looked like? ....

The Bump Heard 'Round The World [The Root]