This paper addresses the belonging of jazz dance in higher education. It first traces a brief lineage of jazz dance. Then, it describes the aesthetics of jazz dance that come directly from the African Diaspora. Intertwined with personal experience, it calls for the decolonization of dance within higher education from a commercialized education to one that gives acknowledgement to the true roots and value of jazz dance. It was first written in 2021 as a research assignment in Dance 200 at UW-Madison, and later revised in April 2023 as a final capstone project.