Opinion

College Professor Wants Racist ‘Jingle Bells’ Song Banned. Let’s not forget ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Black Friday.’

The latest descent into college absurdity are protestations about the song ‘Jingle Bells.’ The claim, made by a Kyna Hamill, a theater history professor at Boston University, claims that the song was used in minstrel shows to make fun of black people in the way they reacted when it snowed.

Hamill claims the song, written 160 years ago by James Pierpont, was written to ridicule black people and was first performed in a blackface minstrel hall in Boston in 1857.

The professor said that her study of the history of the song proved that the song was made to satirize how black people reacted to winter activities such as sleigh riding. The comedy routine was to portray blacks as “behaving foolishly, grotesquely, and incompetently” in unfamiliar situations. (Breitbart)

The fact that some minstrel shows used the song that way does not mean that the song was written to depict what Hamill claims for the song. There is nothing in the lyrics that would indicate any racist origin.

The last stanza is usually left out, not because it’s racist but because it’s thought to be “racy.”

Not too long ago some black college students wanted the 1942 Irving Berlin song “White Christmas,” the bestselling recording of all time with more than 150 million copies to its credit, banned from radio stations.

Dan Joseph “presented some college students with a petition urging radio stations to stop playing the holiday classic ‘White Christmas’ because the song only focuses on ‘White’ Christmases. This clearly makes it racially insensitive, since it completely ignores Christmases of other colors. Students were all too willing to check their privilege and take a stand against Bing Crosby’s racially charged micro-aggression.” While the petition was fake, there were enough students to take the bait and sign it.

Parents (and taxpayers like you and me) are paying big bucks for these numbskulls to get a degree (not necessarily an education).

In addition to the song “White Christmas,” there’s also a film White Christmas that stars Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen. White Christmas had been sung by Crosby in the 1942 film Holiday Inn. The film received a 1943 Academy Award for Best Original Song.

The white, of course, is snow which is white by nature, but this didn’t matter to some blacks who booed Darius Rucker’s rendition of the Christmas classic.

Darius Rucker sang the holiday classic White Christmas at the New York Rockefeller Center for the center’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The event continued forward despite a mob of demonstrators protesting a grand jury’s decision not to indict a NYPD officer for the choking death of Eric Garner. Rucker’s performance was met with a firestorm of critics from social media who criticized the former Hootie and the Blowfish singer for covering an apparently racist song.

In a bit of irony, “The original version [of ‘White Christmas’] also hit number one on the Harlem Hit Parade for three weeks, [Bing] Crosby’s first-ever appearance on the black-oriented chart.”

One has to wonder if the race carders will go all-Orwellian on us by ridding our nation of everything white. Will they claim that blackboards were replaced with whiteboards because of “white privilege”?

This type of nonsense has a long history among some American blacks.

There’s a scene in the film Malcolm X when Malcolm Little (later to take the name Malcolm X, X standing for his unknown African heritage)1 is in prison and is introduced to the philosophy of the “Honorable Elijah Muhammad” and the Nation of Islam (N.O.I.) by a fellow prisoner named John Elton Bembry.2

Malcolm was wasting his life outside of prison, and he was wasting his life in prison. The Bembry character saw something in Malcolm, but Malcolm was resistant to change and had no interest in the Nation of Islam until Bembry showed him a dictionary and the definitions of “black” and “white.” It was a strategic move that rattled the former street hustler.

The definition of “black,” as Bembry read from an edition of Webster’s Dictionary, is always negative: “destitute of light, devoid of color, enveloped in darkness, utterly dismal or gloomy, soiled with dirt, foul, sullen, hostile, forbidding, outrageously wicked.”

White, on the other hand, is positive: “the color of pure snow, the opposite of black, free from spot or blemish, innocent, pure, without evil intent, harmless, square deal, honest.” Malcolm makes a connection: “This is written by White folks, right?”

Like many blacks today, the naïve young Malcolm accepts the illogical leap that the definitional meaning of black and its descriptive attributes are applicable to people with dark skin. A dictionary edited by Blacks would have to acknowledge that the definition of “black” is the absence of light and white. In fact, The Urban Dictionary offers these definitions:

  1. A color widely defined as the absence of light.
  2. The darkest shade possible
  3. The opposite of white . . . best described on the Yin & Yang symbol.

Bembry was poisoning the well by continually stating that these are the white man’s definitions. He had a vested interest in making all aspects of white society and culture, even the standard definition of black, to mean anti-black person.

Joy Behar, who co-hosts on “The View,” couldn’t help turning “Black Friday” into a racial issue. Whoopi Goldberg opened the show with the declaration that “Today is Black Friday, all day long.” Behar offers this rejoinder: “Isn’t it a little racist to call it Black Friday? . . . [T]here’s a negative connotation to it? Or does it mean something else?”

Goldberg, for once, had better sense: “No, it’s like when you make all the money — you’re in the black.” Behar finally gets it: “So it’s positive?” Yes, Joy, it’s positive. Being “in the black” is better than being “in the red.” It won’t be too long before some Native Americans protest that red should no longer be used to indicate a deficit.

Blacks are not helped by the continued claim that all problems for them are racial. Some are, but many aren’t. Black on black crime is not the fault of white people. Sky-high out-of-wedlock births are not the fault of whites. High dropout rates among blacks are not the fault of white people.

Some blacks will say that I don’t know what it’s like growing up Black. There is no doubt about it; I don’t know what it’s like, and I never will. But my lack of black perspective doesn’t change what is going on in some areas of the black community that aren’t my fault or the fault of whites.

  1. The “X” is not the Roman numeral 10. The “X” was a placeholder for a Black person’s unknown African name. His American surname was given to him by his slave master. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. []
  2. Bembry is a composite character who does not appear in the book The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm’s family members introduced him the tenets of the N.O.I. []
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