I read an interesting article earlier today in the Chicago Tribune titled When outsiders look in on black America. This article is on the mark. And a white guy wrote it, lol.

I can’t help but roll my eyes when I hear or read comments from white folks that they know any and everything about black folks. To be honest most don’t have a clue. Especially when they go off the deep end by calling the Obamas fist bump a terrorist fist jab. That’s right, I’m talking about you Faux News, aka Fox News.

When outsiders look in on black America

By Rex W. Huppke

Mike Terry is black, and he knows that a black man giving someone a fist bump is not news. He also knows that calling a man’s wife his “baby mama” is derogatory, and that no self-respecting black person he has ever met would use the term “whitey,” even if they wanted to insult a white person.

That’s why he rolls his eyes at the news media’s recent coverage of Barack and Michelle Obama. He calls it “typical,” emblematic of the gap in understanding between black and non-black America.

“The brother is black, and he can’t throw up a fist?” asked Terry, a West Side bill collector. “That’s what we do.”

Though Obama has tried to make his skin color an ancillary element of the campaign, the issue of race continually swings front and center, with the predominantly white news media taking on the often-awkward role of interpreting black culture for the masses.

Take, for example, the fist bump Obama gave his wife before officially declaring victory in the Democratic primary campaign. Early news reports of the bump sparked interest on the Internet, so more reporters jumped on the story, and it took on a life of its own. At the height of the frenzy, the fist bump was bizarrely described on Fox News as a “terrorist fist jab.”

Even to some non-black voters, this all seemed like overkill, revealing a distinct disconnect between the media and the black community, where a fist bump is as common a gesture as a high-five.

“It’s a disconnect that should be expected,” said Sherrie Mazingo, a recently retired University of Minnesota journalism professor who studies race and the media. “The mainstream media doesn’t know how to accommodate coverage of a black presidential candidate. They don’t know how to reconcile this candidacy with their generally limited knowledge of people of color, and black people especially.”

That last sentence says it all. When mainstream media is run by and dominated on air by mostly white males, there will continue to be a media run by folks who make a mountain out of a molehill and don’t have a clue about folks who don’t look like them.

You can read the entire article here.