CNN Ruins Everything

Remember how I said I don't like CNN? This is why. In one of their annoying Jeannie Moos videos (which are supposed to be funny, and possibly are, to white people over the age of 50), they tackle the 'fist bump' shared by Barack and Michelle in St. Paul on Tuesday. First off, it's not called a fist bump. That's lame. It's a pound, which falls under the category of dap. And the one thing CNN's cute little video fails to mention, is the black origins of said dap. You'd think they would, considering it was two black people sharing a pound who got all this started. The video hinted that baseball was involved in the evolution of the pound, but... come on. As Ta-Nehisi writes, something can be both black, and mainstream.

"The most interesting, and quite common, response has been "well I'm white as hell and I do the fist-bump with my wife, so it can't be that black." To me that response says more about the speaker--and race in this country--than about any measure of "blackness." It has as its unspoken premise that black is something that's stagnant, mutually exclusive to itself, and incapable of existing alongside other qualities. [...] The fact that you're in Wisconsin somewhere performing an ritual that was perfected on the South Side of Chicago probably means that it's mainstream. But that doesn't mean it didn't come from the South Side. Both are true at the same time."

It's amazing that even a little presidential nominee pound can open up discussions about race. I suspect CNN avoided the black thing purposely, because there's still some desire to paint Barack as post-racial.