I Had To Post This One

It's a Tom Tomorrow comic strip about the recent spate of non-racist discourse in our media today. I'm bothered by this strip, but not because of the subject matter. I'm bothered that there are people out there who think that calling a well-educated, married black woman a "baby momma" is not offensive. I'm also blown away by the idea that the fist bump (which my uncle pointed out to me is derived from the Wonder Twins) is considered a possible terrorist sign. How? Seriously, how the holy hell does this even come into someone's mind as being real?

To get a little deeper into the fist bump, let's go back to the late 1980s when people would "hit that rock", which was taking your fist and hitting the top of another person's fist. It was a play on the handshakes that black people seem to like to do so much [I'm pretty sure that I could go back to the 70s and look at the whole soul movement, but that would require research as my memories can't go back further than my own existence], but it was pretty harmless. Jumping in time to the period of SARS, people were trying to come up with alternatives to the handshake to keep from making others sick, and hitting the rock started to come back. It was mutating into the "fist bump" but was now becoming a high-five replacement over the greeting that it used to be. Really I'm just talking out of my ass on this one because this is as far from scientific as I can get, but the point I'm trying to make is that this is an American home-grown concept that doesn't have a basis in terrorist activities.

The point of the comic is to say that the racists don't see themselves as such, and even Tom has a little trouble trying to make their current behaviors fit his strip.