Banning the Fans: Policing Black Women, Policing Black Joy

Abstract

ABSTRACT In many public self‐segregating/segregated Black spaces—cookouts, family reunions, wedding receptions, fraternity and sorority gatherings, birthday parties, HBCU and Divine 9 professional conferences, some workplaces, and even cruises—803Fresh's 2024 “Boots on the Ground (Where Them Fans At?)” was the 2025 Song and Line Dance of the Summer. When Carnival Cruise Line banned “clacking fans” on indoor club dance floors in June 2025, many saw this ban as a policing of community and communal joy. This essay considers the racial and gendered US history of Black church hand fans and contextualizes the Carnival fan ban within this current US political and social moment of resistance and radical community‐building and sustaining.