For readers of TruthRevolt, surely no hateful, identity politics nonsense a radical academic today can say would come as a surprise. So it should raise no eyebrows that a Boston University theater professor has proclaimed that the bouncy, joyful Christmas tune “Jingle Bells” is — wait for it — racist.
Kyna Hamill, a BU theater historian, wrote in her “Theatre Survey” research paper on the story behind the beloved carol that it has a “problematic history” because it was originally performed to make fun of African-Americans, according to Fox News.
“The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is one where [sic] its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history,” she claims, making it sound like a white supremacist conspiracy.
“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,” she wrote in true identity politics jargon.
Is it really necessary to remind these race-obsessed academics that “white Christmas” refers to snow, not to white people? Can a research paper on the racism of snow be far behind?
Fox News has the details:
Hamill started researching the history of the famous Christmas carol after a so-called “Jingle Bells War” – a dispute between two towns, Medford, Mass. and Savannah, Ga. – that claim to be the birthplace of the song written by James Pierpont.
“Its 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,” Hamill wrote.
The traces of blackface minstrel origins can be found in the music and lyrics, as well as the “elements of ‘male display,’ boasting, and the unbridled behavior of the male body onstage,” the author wrote.
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.
“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.”
Notice how Hamill manages to squeeze in critiques of racism, toxic masculinity, and capitalism in her paper on every child’s favorite Christmas carol. Bravo, cultural Marxist!
Hamill added that her research has been public for two years and has nothing to do with Christmas. Of course it does. “Jingle Bells” is nothing if not about Christmas, and the target of cultural Marxism in general, and of this paper specifically, is the deconstruction of western traditions and values.
Twitter users, predictably, took Hamill to the woodshed over this academic blather.
“Jingle Bells is racist, White Christmas is racist, Baby it’s Cold Outside is sexist. What the hell happend [sic] to the America I grew up in where people didn’t wake up every day trying to find something to be offended by?” wrote one Twitterer. The radical Left — that’s what happened to America.
Another didn’t mince words about Hamill herself. “That professor is an idiot,” read the tweet. “The actors had black face because in the time, blacks weren’t allowed to act. Because they sang it, doesn’t make it racist.”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
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