May I Have This Dance?

Jerusalema

Apr 28, 2026

There is a song.

Maybe you’ve heard it. Maybe it found you the way holy things tend to find us ~ not when we go looking, but when we are barely holding on and something breaks through anyway.

Jerusalema. A Zulu-language gospel-house song born in South Africa, carried by the voice of Nomcebo Zikode and the vision of producer Master KG. A prayer. A longing. A cry. A dance.

And I believe we are being called to dance.

“Find someone to dance with you through the darkness…” The Pitt

What the song says

The words are a prayer. A petition. Jerusalem is my home ~ guard me, walk with me, do not leave me here.

It is a song of the in-between ~ of people who know what it is to be far from where they belong, crying out to the G-d who sees them anyway.

Black women have been singing this prayer for centuries. Not always in these words. Sometimes in a moan. Sometimes in a quilt pattern. Sometimes, in the way we braid each other’s hair or pass a dish without being asked. Sometimes, in showing the hell up to the next meeting, the next rally, the next doctor’s appointment, the next damn day ~ when everything in us is tired, and we go anyway.

That is Jerusalema. That has always been Jerusalema.

I know something about being far from home

I have lived in the wilderness. Not as metaphor ~ as address.

I survived domestic violence. I know what it is to be in a house that is not a home, to sleep next to danger, to smile in public and bleed in private. I know what it is to pray do not leave me here and wonder if G-d was listening. I know what it is to get out and then have to rebuild yourself from pieces that don’t quite fit together the same way anymore.

And then ~ I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Stage IV. The kind they tell you is not curable. The kind that moves into your bones and your life and your plans and rearranges everything without asking permission.

I have been far from home in my own body. I have been far from home in systems that were designed to harm me. I have been far from home in rooms where my expertise was welcomed, and my humanity was optional.

And yet.

And yet here I am. Still writing. Still teaching. Still preaching. Still building. Still breathing.

If that is not a reason to dance, I don’t know what is.

What is going on

We are watching the dismantling of systems that were already insufficient. We are watching Black and brown communities targeted with new efficiency and old cruelty. We are watching our trans and queer siblings have their existence legislated against. We are watching the language of equity scrubbed from institutions that never fully believed it anyway. We are watching people who survived one crisis get handed another before they’ve caught their breath.

It is a lot. It is heavy as hell. And I am not going to insult you by telling you it isn’t.

Yet, I have learned the hard way, through cancer treatments and court dates and committee rooms and all the other places I have had to show up when I would rather have stayed in bed:

Grief and joy are not enemies. They live in the same house.

The women in Jerusalema ~ the women who made that video that went viral across the globe, dancing outside hospitals and churches and courtyard stoops ~ they were not dancing because everything was fine. They were dancing in the middle of a pandemic. In the middle of loss. In the middle of uncertainty.

They were dancing because they were still here.

That is not escapism. That is resistance. That is the oldest theology Black people carry ~ the insistence that our joy is not contingent on our circumstances, that our bodies belong to us, that we will move them in celebration even when the world is trying to make us still.

Womanism taught me this

Audre Lorde said it before I had language for it: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The tools of survival that white supremacy hands us ~ dissociation, performance, the forever-grind, the proving of our worth through exhaustion ~ those will not free us.

But joy? Community? The refusal to let them take our rhythm? That is something else entirely.

Womanist theology ~ the tradition I am rooted in, the one handed down through Delores Williams, Katie Geneva Cannon, Jacqueline Grant, and so many Black women who insisted their full humanity was theological ~ does not separate the sacred from the body. Does not separate worship from movement. Does not separate the spirit from the street.

When we dance, we are praying with our whole selves. When we gather and move together, we are enacting Ubuntu ~ I am because we are ~ in real time. When we refuse to let the weight of the world flatten us entirely, we are making a theological claim: that G-d is still present, that life is still worth celebrating, that we are not yet finished.

This is a discipline. A practice. A choice we make every single day to remain human in systems that benefit from our dehumanization.

So beloved ~ let’s dance

Not because everything is okay.

Not because the fight is over.

Not because we are not tired, or grieving, or scared, or furious.

But because we are still here. Because our bodies still remember joy. Because somewhere in South Africa, a woman opened her mouth and G-d came out in the form of a house beat and a prayer, and the whole world ~ for a moment ~ moved together.

Because I have been through too much to give them my rhythm, too.

Because you have been through too much to give them yours.

Find the song. Turn it up. Move your body ~ even if it’s just your shoulders, even if it’s just your feet, even if it’s alone in your kitchen at 11 pm with the lights still on because the world feels too heavy to turn them off.

Dance because you survived.

Dance because you’re still surviving.

Dance because you are made for more than endurance ~ you are made for joy.

Jerusalema ~ guard me. Walk with me. Do not leave me here.

So, may I have this dance?

Dr. TAD

Thought Provoker | Critical Agitator | Black Diasporic Protagonist | Womanist.

Tawana Angela Davis

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