Mystery Solved! It's "The Dap"!

Ooooh, I'm getting my groove now.

From Newhouse via the Times-Picayune:

Moments before stepping to the podium Tuesday night to acknowledge that he would be the first black candidate nominated by a major party for president of the United States, Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, knocked knuckles.

It was a tiny gesture so cool, so tight, so loving and so right, that it seemed to encapsulate both the satisfaction of the moment and the new cultural trajectory of American politics.

"Barack and Michelle were giving each other some 'dap,' " says Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University. "I was watching the speech with my wife and she saw 'the dap' and said, 'Do you see that? A bunch of folks must be wondering what that means."

Yeeaah! Cool, tight, loving, right! Ya gotta love 'em. But wait! How much cool can the citizenry of the US take? What would the Founding Fathers think?

To wit: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who on Wednesday asked Obama about the dap, noting that Michelle had "tried to give her husband a fist pound the way a lot of Americans do, the way a lot of couples do. The only problem it's an inside move shared in front of 17-and-a-half thousand people in the arena and millions watching at home."

Of course! Why Brian, of the raccoon eyes due to tanning with his goggles on, is right! It was as though they had sex right there on the stage. Tell me, is there anyone less cool than Brian Williams? Well, probably. What can one do to confront this sort of assininity, but make sport of it?

In fact, Neal says, the dap probably does trace its early origins to the black power salute of the 1960s.

Horrors! Can this be? Bring me my smelling salts.

But it morphed into what it is today -- lateral instead of vertical -- in the intersection of hip-hop and the National Basketball Association in the 1980s. In the years since, it has become familiar beyond the black world to many Americans younger than 50 -- especially to anyone glued to a television as professional athletes congratulate each other on exceptional performance.

Black people and those under 50 -- a demographic that has come to be known by another name: Obama's base.

Dayum! Now that is scary. How did I know that the gesture was common? I'm in the wrong demographic. Is it possible that I'm 43, instead of 73?