“So can I keep my hip-white-boy status? Pleeze?”

Maybe white people will get more used to blackness, and to markers of it–things like black music, and black gestures, and black words and phrases and names. Today is a day to be especially hopeful, and these are among the things I’m hoping for.

Some white Americans love black culture, or what they think is black culture (especially corporate hip hop). But very few white Americans love to see black culture in their political leaders. Here’s hoping that the ascendancy of Barack Obama will expand the confines of the traditional white male model for leadership, and that Hillary Clinton has expanded it in terms of gender as well.

Finally, here’s one more especially black moment, performed by Barack Obama. And here’s one more hope–that we see more such moments, and that they make white America love him even more, as he helps them get used to blackness.

(from get used to blackness at Stuff White People Do)

African American men don’t shake hands like that.

Now, here’s the rest of what [a handbook on American customs] for foreign visitors says about how “we” shake hands–is this really how all of us shake hands?

When Americans shake hands, they normally exert a small amount of pressure on each others’ hands, move their clasped hands a bit upwards, then a bit downwards, then release their grip. People from other places where handshaking is customary may hold the other person’s hand more or less firmly than Americans do, sustaining contact for a shorter or a longer time than Americans. One’s character in the U.S. is often assumed by the appropriateness of their handshake.

Obviously, African American men in particular have other ways of putting their hands together, and other racial groups do as well (though I’ll admit, I don’t know what forms the latter take). So this visitor’s handbook may be explaining the “normal” American method, but it’s really the “white” method.

[...]

What’s more interesting, though, about differences in handshaking techniques is that if a white and a non-white person encounter each other in a casual setting and decide to clasp hands, there may be uncertainty about which handshaking method to use–the white one or a non-white one. When there is uncertainty about which to use, the fall-back is usually the standard handshake, that is, the method more likely to be used by the white person than by the non-white one. The non-white person often represses a preferred method of contact, and the white person feels little if any discomfort about being the enforcer of a standard.

(from shake hands our way at Stuff White People Do)
(emphasis mine)