Jingle Bells is RACIST?

By Professor Doom

     One thing about the social justice warriors (SJW) is they are never happy. It’s why our campuses are now obsessed with micro-aggressions, offenses so tiny they cannot be seen, and yet still can merit punishment because they annoy the SJW.

      Racism annoys SJWs as well, and because they being miserable and spreading misery, darn near everything is racist, from milk to financial literacy to mathematics.

     In the holiday spirit, then, allow me to address one more thing to make the SJW angry:

Boston University professor claims Jingle Bells is RACIST 

--the title is arguably misleading, however, and I ask some forgiveness if I’ve clickbaited by using their title.

     Filing one more in the “I can’t make this crap up” category, I really think we’ve gone overboard here. Everything, apparently, can be called racist now, and, more importantly, you can get kudos from admin (as well as press coverage) for making a claim that something is racist.

     So why is the song racist?

In the course of her research, Hamill discovered a playbill indicating that Jingle Bells was first performed under the title One Horse Open Sleigh in blackface, for a minstrel show at Ordway Hall on Boston's Washington Street in 1857.

      So, the song was performed in blackface in 1857. And? Almost every professional musical performance in the United States in the mid-19^th century was made in blackface…even black performers put on blackface. An actual history professor knows this, and knows that if “was performed in blackface” makes a song racist, every song sung in that century would be racist.

      SJWs are nuts, plain and simple.

      The song, as I trust the gentle reader knows, is about having fun riding a “one horse open sleigh.” What about that is racist? Essentially nobody in the United States owns a horse anymore, and only a fraction of those rare few have a sleigh…are they racist, too?

      To her credit, the theatre history professor is backtracking and clarifying only that Jingle Bells has racist roots…but I find this pretty thin sauce. Simply singing a song in blackface, at a time when that’s how songs were done, does not make the song racist, or even attribute racism in any way—it would be scores of years later before “racism” and “blackface” would become linked. This it taking “guilt by association” way too far, and the possibility that this song’s possible debut was possibly made by blackface singers is a historical detail, nothing more.

     Checking her other works, I do concede that she’s a legitimate scholar, and probably not a true SJW, so perhaps she’s being honest in saying her work is being misinterpreted. Still, you know the SJWs upon finding out about this legitimate research, will use this as justification to be offended some more.

      If so, I hope some folks will take the opportunity to bellow it out just few decibels higher than reasonable just for the non-benefit of the SJW.

      The comments section uniformly laughs at the idiocy here, and rightly so. However, I take it as a message of hope: the general public is now starting to pay attention not merely to what’s being said on campus, but also to what’s being considered as publishable research.

     Happy Holidays, all, and best wishes for the new year.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com