The Diaspora of The White Praise Skirt : Research Exploration Introduction

Dancing in my white praise skirt on the Isla Verde in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Diaspora of the White Skirt

So I’m sitting here at the end of my day and I’m thinking.

First of all, I told y’all that my last trip to Puerto Rico, I literally freaked out during the last hour before the flight. It felt like my housing wasn’t secure, and I was just in my head and not really rooted in my intention for why I was traveling.

Movement for the sake of movement sometimes does not feel very settling on my spirit. And I already do enough of that just moving from day to day with work.

So a priestess that I’ve been wanting to connect with has a two-day experience happening two days before my return flight from Puerto Rico, before I’m supposed to come back to Chicago. I thought that was really interesting.

And I just keep thinking about this idea of the diaspora of the white skirt.

If I’m being honest with y’all, that is really the thing that has been on my heart and on my spirit. It has been for years.

Even back when I was in college, trying to figure out what was next in the journey that I was even on, and why these things were calling me so deeply.

My mom took me to Brazil when I was twelve years old. That experience stayed with me until I was a young adult, when I decided that I was going to do my study abroad in Salvador da Bahia.

From that experience I was introduced to Candomblé. And from Candomblé, I was introduced to Lucumí.

Through all of those experiences, I kept noticing this through line: this calling in the drumming, this calling in the gathering of bodies, and in movement together. Especially movement in communion with something higher.

Something bigger than ourselves.

Something that allows us to be uplifted, to be free, and to have a moment of praise that goes beyond whatever our current circumstances might be.

Now, y’all know I grew up in the church.

And I happily embrace that upbringing, even as I try to talk honestly about how I have grown outside of it.

For a long time, especially in my twenties, I was fighting against the painful things that I experienced within Christianity. I wanted to distance myself from it completely. I wanted to collapse that bridge and move on.

But when you collapse a bridge like that, you take a lot of memory with it.

And even with me trying to collapse that bridge, my ancestors have been very clear that it cannot be collapsed.

It is something that I have to integrate with and understand.

I always say: take the meat and spit out the bones.

The things that work, work. The things that don’t, don’t.

But you have to be clear about that if you want to create a new paradigm for yourself about how you move forward in your spiritual practice.

This also connects back to embracing your sensual and erotic self.

Because a lot of the reasons we can’t do that are shame-based. And that shame comes from cultural experience, socialization, and the communities that we depend on for our livelihood and belonging.

If the values that those communities hold don’t align with the ways you experience your body, your sensuality, or your spirit, then it can feel like you’re making decisions against your own survival.

It can feel like you’re making decisions against your ability to be held in community.

And that’s hard.

Because we all want to be held.

But if those values no longer serve you, then at some point you have to make a shift. You have to take the things from that space that work, and you have to leave the things that don’t.

That, in many ways, is what I understand as Afrofuturism.

Maybe I’m not completely right about that, and I’m open to learning and having conversation about it. But I do think there is something there.

The taking of what worked and continuing to move forward in order to create the communities that are needed.

I think about writers like Octavia Butler, who imagined futures where we had to reshape the ways we lived in order to survive.

And that brings me back to this idea of the diaspora of the white skirt.

Because I grew up in the church doing praise dance.

I had white skirts. Multiple ones. Different styles that were used for ministering.

Ministering, in that context, meant communicating a spiritual message through movement. It meant using the body to move a congregation from one spiritual place to another.

And when I later encountered the white skirts worn in ceremonies within Candomblé, I had a question.

Where has our praise gone?

Where has our visceral experience with the body and with God gone in the Black Church?

Now, I’m not trying to save the Black church. That’s not my goal.

But I do think it’s important to think about what these traditions have carried, and how they have moved across the diaspora.

And from there, the real question becomes: what do we take from these traditions in order to build communities and practices that are inclusive of all of us?

Communities where we don’t feel left behind.

Communities where we don’t feel like we are outside of God’s grace.

Communities that call on different technologies — spiritual technologies — that allow us to transcend the pain, devastation, and disappointment of our current reality.

Something that calls on something bigger.

Something more resourced.

Something that can manifest something new.

Because if you ever doubt that it’s possible, you only have to remember what our ancestors manifested in us.

Sometimes the lesson isn’t just about who we are right now.

Sometimes it’s about the many versions of us — across timelines, across futures — who will need the lessons that we are learning today.