Member-only story
Why Black Men Shake Hands Differently
How racism created the warm hand clasp known as DAP
Published in
4 min readFeb 19, 2025
It’s quite common that when Black men greet each other, or even others who are close with them, they embrace with a warm clasp of hands.
Key and Peele comedically highlighted this in one of their famous skits where a fictional Barack Obama exchanges handshakes and hugs with fellow Black men and women after a press conference but greets white folks quite differently.
My first recollection of the handshake was in middle school in Columbus, Ohio.
The school had been integrated shortly before I started there, thanks to the late Judge Robert Duncan, who in 1977 ruled in Penick v. Columbus Board of Education that school officials were intentionally using school boundary methods to keep Black and white students separate.
