It's like a challenge between leftists professors on who can make the dumbest statement. "Jingle Bells" is racist according to a Boston professor. He says the loved Christmas carol has a "problematic" origination.
Kyna Hamill is the Boston University theater professor who made these ridiculous claims. Hamnil says that the carol was first performed as a mockery of African-Americans while wearing blackface.
“As I mentioned in my article, the first documented performance of the song is in a blackface minstrel hall in Boston in 1857, the same year it was copyrighted,” Hamill told Fox News. “Much research has been done on the problematic history of this nineteenth-century entertainment.”
In a research paper called Theater Survey, Hamill wrote, “The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is one where its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history."
“Although ‘One Horse Open Sleigh,’ for most of its singers and listeners, may have eluded its racialized past and taken its place in the seemingly unproblematic romanticization of a normal ‘white’ Christmas, attention to the circumstances of its performance history enables reflection on its problematic role in the construction of blackness and whiteness in the United States,” the professor continued
Per Daily Wire:
According to Hamill, the song's "origins emerged from the economic needs of a perpetually unsuccessful man, the racial politics of antebellum Boston, the city’s climate, and the intertheatrical repertoire of commercial blackface performers moving between Boston and New York."
There are also apparent “elements of ‘male display,’ boasting, and the unbridled behavior of the male body onstage,” says Hamill.
Here's Hamill's hot-take on the allegedly troubling lyrics, via Fox News:
The song’s lyrics, which Hamill adds “display no real originality,” and reference things like “Miss Fanny Bright” and “dashing through the snow” connect the song to blackface dandy, according to the research paper.
“Words such as ‘thro,’ ‘tho’t,’ and ‘upsot’ suggest a racialized performance that attempted to sound ‘southern’ to a northern audience,” Hamill wrote.
If you want to be politically correct and thus can't play "Jingle Bells" this holiday season, there are many other Christmas tunes you can play — just avoid "Baby it's Cold Outside" (the sexist tune perpetuates rape culture), "White Christmas" (more blatant racism), or "Mary, Did You Know" (Christmas should be more inclusive than just Christianity).
Actually, just shut up and drink from your Starbucks cup that has a lesbian couple plastered on it, and like it.
Some took to Twitter to expose the ridiculousness of this stance.
“Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh ! It's not racist."
Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh ! It's not racist. That professor is an idiot. The actors had black face because in the time, blacks weren't allowed to act. Because they sang it, doesn't make it racist.
— Lori B 777? (@Lori_B_777) December 15, 2017
“Jingle Bells is racist, White Christmas is racist, Baby it’s Cold Outside is sexist. What the hell happend to the America I grew up in where people didn’t wake up every day trying to find something to be offended by?”
https://twitter.com/richc580/status/941405128803913729
The bad part is the professor is actually serious.
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