Apparently, the price of admission for a Black woman to do God’s work is still a mandatory turtleneck. When Dr. Karri Turner Bryant stepped out with her husband, Root 100 honoree Pastor Jamal Bryant, in a flesh-toned floor-length gown for the UNCF Mayor’s Masked Ball, she wasn’t just supporting HBCUs, she inadvertently walked into a theological ambush. And the Black internet is still talking about it.
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To catch you up, Turner Bryant attended the UNCF Atlanta Mayor’s Masked Ball on Dec. 20. Her black and lace dress took over the timelines for its cleavage, tight fit and nude illusion.
“You look incredible First Lady!,” one person penned on Instagram. Another commented: “Man what was the problem? They ain’t NEVAAAAAAA SEEN nothing like this as a First Lady.” But not everyone agreed.
“and this is the leader of the black community?? And the black clergy in total silence?????,” one person on X wrote, while another wrote in Turner Bryant’s Instagram comments that her “Dress is too revealing. I can see her undies.”
But if the critics thought Turner Bryant was going to fold like a Sunday bulletin, they were mistaken.
Pastor Bryant addressed those online who “went crazy about a dress,” but “didn’t say anything about the $4 million dollars that was raised for the United Negro College Fund” and how “insecure, jealous, petty small-minded people got in their feelings and set up a false barometer of holiness based off of a dress” on Instagram.
His wife took to the comments to thank him, but, “Not just for me, but for every woman who has experienced what I continue to walk through.”
The couple’s response didn’t just address a dress; it snatched the wig off respectability politics, asking the one question the traditional church might be terrified to answer: Since when did holiness become synonymous with hiding?
The irony, of course, is that the “modesty” being weaponized against the first lady of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church is a direct descendant of the very respectability politics that Black women once used as a shield. Historically, the “Sunday Best” wasn’t just about fashion; it was a sartorial suit of armor designed to counter the hyper-sexualized, dehumanizing caricatures of the Jim Crow era.
By dressing in white gloves and “proper” hemlines, Black women were asserting a dignity that the world tried (but failed) to deny them. But somewhere between the civil rights marches and the Instagram feed, that shield became a shackle. The tool used to demand respect from the outside world morphed into a rigid checklist to monitor, judge and silence the women in the pews.
But the controversy around her dress is ushering in a new normal when it comes to God’s house (including those who are in) and where anointing isn’t measured by how much fabric is covering a woman’s collarbone. By refusing to apologize for her style and curves, Turner Bryant exposed the shaky theological ground that respectability was birthed on– the idea that a woman’s body is a “distraction” that must be managed rather than a temple to be celebrated.
The uncomfortable truth is that these “modest” dress codes aren’t for the benefit of the woman wearing them, nor the God she serves. They are a performance for a “status quo” that fears what happens when Black women stop asking for permission to take up space.
It’s a shift that moves the conversation from “is this appropriate?” to “who does this standard actually serve?” The Bryants just reminded the culture that you can’t police a move of God, no matter how much you dislike the dress it arrived in.
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