‘Boots on the Ground’ dance spotlights church fans as a symbol of Black women’s resistance

If you’ve been to any cookouts or weddings this summer, there’s a good chance you watched the dance floor fill up when "Boots on the Ground" by 803 Fresh came on.

The music video prominently features Black women dancing in groups, waving hand fans in vibrant colors. A viral TikTok dance featuring the fans, choreographed by a creator named Tre Little, takes inspiration from the music video. If you have seen folks dancing to “Boots on the Ground” this summer, it’s likely they’re doing Tre’s steps.

The song is a certified sensation — it got a fresh burst of popularity recently when a remix, featuring Grammy-winner Fantasia, was released.

Neal Lester, Ph.D., the director of Arizona State University's Project Humanities, sees the song and the dance as a major cultural moment. Wednesday evening at the Tempe History Museum, he’ll be presenting an evening of conversation — and dancing — called “Boots on the Ground: Policing Community and Joy.”

The Show spoke with him about the “Boots on the Ground” phenomenon, and the ideas it’s got him thinking about.

Full conversation

NEAL LESTER: You know, I hadn’t even paid attention to the fans until Carnival Cruise Line banned the fans. That’s how this became more. And then last Friday, Fantasia got into the remix, and now it’s like the whole thing has just opened up again.

In fact, it was funny because there was some people like, “Oh, if I hear that song one more time, I already put my boots away.” And then others are now coming off saying, “Wait a minute, I just put my boots away, and now I’ve got to pull them out again.”

SAM DINGMAN: Well, let’s talk about this moment with the fans and Carnival Cruise Lines, because it seems, as you were just describing, that was sort of an inflection point. What was it about that Carnival Cruise incident that changed things for you?

LESTER: Well, I want to clarify that it was not a ban on all the fans. It was a ban on the indoor dance floors. Allegedly — and I’m quoting here — it was part six Carnival Cruise new rules. That’s what the hearing says in the announcement. One had to do with team curfew. Then right under that is the fan ban.

And here’s how it reads: It says Carnival has banned folding clack fans inside nightclubs and indoor dance floors for safety. And then it goes on to say there’s a pool chair rule: Leave your chair for 40-plus minutes unattended, the crew may clear your items. And then the last one was just about boarding requirements, you know, check in online by midnight before sailing.

Now the fan ban within those things seemed odd to me.

DINGMAN: Yes, it sounds odd to my ear as well.

LESTER: And it didn’t fit the other things, because the other stuff to me would make sense. And then you’ve got the fan ban, allegedly the clack fans because of “safety.” That’s when it opened up all these, for me, culturally specific ways in which certain kinds of behavior, certain kinds of fun are policed.

Nobody I know has been injured by a fan clacking during a line dance song. And these fans are sacred artifacts. You’re not going to take your fan and bop somebody over the head with it and risk breaking it.

Kristen LaRue-Sandler

DINGMAN: Right. One could read the writing of this rule — given the remarkable popularity of this song and this particular dance — one could read it as targeting this particular song and, by extension, the group of people who tend to take to the dance floor and dance to this particular song.

LESTER: And that’s precisely my argument, which is why I say policing community and joy. This sort of history that I have witnessed between Black women and emotion and Black women and church fans, Black church hand fans. And so all of those sort of collide in a space that makes this more than about a fan and a dance. It is really a potential form of resistance, where the fan itself is almost like this weapon.

And I don’t mean weapon in a sense of used against anybody individual. But this resistance to say, “OK, USA, you have shown us who you are. Us Black women are just going to be over here learning a line dance while y’all try to watch the nation fall apart.”

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, I mean, this makes me think of a case that I was reading being made by a professor named Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir.

LESTER: Oh I know that name. Uh huh.

DINGMAN: Yes. And she was saying — and I’d be curious to get your reaction to this — that the political climate specifically has contributed to the success of boots on the ground, particularly in the Black community. Because, as you were mentioning, over 9 in 10 Black women voted against President Donald Trump in the last election and that his policies have disproportionately affected Black Americans, including the elimination of DEI programs, federal layoffs, cuts to SNAP benefits, Medicare and Medicaid.

LESTER: Well, and I would even be more specific than that, though. I think what Harris’ campaign represented was a historical moment that could have been. It certainly was, but it could have been. And there was a very specific space that Harris occupied and occupies that even President Obama could not occupy. And what could have been could have been something that grew out of what many witnessed in that Democratic National Convention, was joy.

I also recall, and you might as well, that Vice President Harris was mocked and ridiculed because she laughed, because she did seem to present a vision that was not dystopian, which people then read as, “Oh, she’s not paying attention to what’s happening. There’s no kitchen table issues,” when in fact she did have policies.

The whole mannerisms, the cultural space that she occupied, that was something very particular to Black women and not just Black people. And when we talk about the fans, what I’ve noticed is the sort of gendering of those fans, because the Black men are not dancing with the fans. Let’s put it this way, the (cisgender, heterosexual) men are not dancing with fans, even if they’re dancing on the floor till the song.

Queer folks are certainly embracing the fan and have, but we could trace that to sort of a connection with Black women and those cultural spaces as well.

DINGMAN: And if I’m not mistaken, the dance itself was originally choreographed by a queer Black man, Trè Little.

LESTER: Correct.

DINGMAN: Well, I was going to ask about that. Do you think there is an additional layer of significance to the fact that in the video for “Boots on the Ground,” there is such a celebration of Black women specifically dancing to this song and that it was choreographed by a queer Black man and that these are these are forms of Blackness that are even more invisible than Black men in our culture?

LESTER: Yes. Well, because if we look at that hierarchy, Black men are still men, and we still know that there’s a huge gap between the realities and inequities between men and women. And that happens racially also. I was reading this piece that said, for Black women, the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it was like a gut punch. And the day after the election, it felt like their voices and concerns didn’t matter.

And so this is a very culturally specific — yes, I get the fact about it’s Black people — but if you go to what I’ve done in terms of the research is going back to Black women in those Black churches, it was the Black women who were with the fans. It was the Black women who were emotionally, you know, overcome by “the Holy Ghost” or “Spirit” and had to be sort of calmed down with the fans.

And it was mostly the women who were the ushers, who would then fan the shouting people into some sort of call.

DINGMAN: Well, and this gets back to you were invoking earlier the idea of the fans as a “sacred object,” I believe was the term you used. Am I following you correctly that part of what is so powerful about this song and the fan dance phenomenon that has accompanied it is that it is foregrounding this really ancient symbol of the role of Black women in the community?

LESTER: Yes. And what I noticed is that the fans became almost — and the frenzy that can result when these fans are used — almost like flight. And so the research took me into a space of looking at these fans as wings and this movement as a kind of repetitive way of sort of transporting people out of an immediacy of a present.