The other day I went on a date with another black man. I haven’t been sleeping well since then.

I might be 45 in June. This means I have been dapping people for over 30 years. I’m a dap savant. I have complicated daps that I do with my kids. I know when to return hug a Black man and when to simply punch him. My dap game is famous. Strangers will discuss my knowledge and perfection.

So what happened recently broke my soul in a way that may have upset Beyoncé: I got here across an idiot in a public place, on a historically black college campus. MC Hammer has a song called “It’s All Good” – it wasn’t quite good; the whole lot was bad.

Let me let you know what happened, son.

I recently visited with a guest speaker to seek advice from the category I teach at Howard University about his writing journey and share insights and best practices for developing writers within the classroom. After class, as is often the case when an interesting guest shows up, some students stayed to speak, and a few left the constructing with us. As we stepped outside, a conversation began about hip-hop, specifically the recent events with a man named J. Cole, aka Light-Skinned Jermaine, and his mea culpa to Kendrick Lamar on stage during his performance on the Dreamville Festival in Fayetteville in North Carolina

The conversation was good and full of life. The three of us exchanged ideas and talked concerning the power of culture and where it could go. You’ve never seen a more necessary conversation about hip-hop on the sidewalk outside Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications in your life. Hop jumped and hip jumped. The Black Excellence concert took place at 10 a.m. and everybody passing by was lucky to bask within the glow of a generational discussion about crucial musical culture of all time.

Phew.

And then it was time to go away. My guest speaker and my student did an impressive job and it was amazing. Time, workmanship… precision; the whole lot landed because it was presupposed to. It was also probably the most tumultuous and uneventful Black exchange of all time. The birds weren’t chirping, but they weren’t chirping either, you understand? The ancestors were as proud as ever when a successful and powerful slap was made amongst Black men.

And then it happened. It was my turn to embellish my student. Now remember I’m a dap scholar. In my entire dapping profession, I have only had failure on a handful of occasions. Even now I don’t know what or why things went unsuitable, and so they occur so rarely that even Malcolm Gladwell would call them outliers. I charged up my arm – already stretched it – and held it out, bracing myself for the impact all of us knew was coming. Except by some means I missed his hand. Or he missed my hand. Nobody really knows. But recovery comes when the whole lot has gone from bad to worse. In utter disgust that my arms were by some means missing, I tried to swap the dap halfway back for a pound, but he settled for the usual holding and cuddling, so we missed each other for the second time. What to do? Where do you even go from here? I’m not saying the guest speaker was judging, but I was judging, so I can only assume he was judging too. He was probably confused too; listed here are two Black men attempting to land a plane on a board, which they each probably did easily 10,000 times without exaggeration.

What happened within the finale will live on (and hopefully die) within the Black Man Dap Hall of Shame. Instead of ending with a proper dap, some form of limp handshake that couldn’t be interpreted as respectful or intentional closed the moment. Even now I am completely upset with the way it happened. I don’t even know the way to deliberately dig into dap, so it makes the random event much more confusing. I don’t break daps and here I am standing on the corner of one among the bastions of Black hope and perfection, letting down Nas. Much like J. Cole and his discrimination against Kendrick Lamar, my silly ass has kept me up the past few nights.

The good thing is that now greater than ever I care about not only never dapping again, but in addition impressing everyone I do it to in the long run. Newspapers and almanacs will discuss my daps in the long run. I swear I might be one of the best from now on. They’ll call me Dapper Pan.

And the whole lot might be okay again.

Lifestyle

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