A month ago, the California NAACP called for the "Star Spangled Banner" to be banned due to its racist roots. Now, a beloved Christmas classic is on the Summer Jam screen!

According to Fox News, Boston University professor Kyna Hamill claims that "Jingle Bells" has a "problematic history" since it was originally performed to make fun of African Americans.

“The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is one where its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history,” wrote Hamill, in her Theatre Survey research paper on the story of "Jingle Bells."

Photo: GIPHY

“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,” Hamill wrote.

What prompted Hamill to study the history of Jingle Bells?

Actually, it was a "Jingle Bells War" that erupted between two towns in Massachusetts and Georgia. The two towns — Medford and Savannah, respectively — were debating over claiming the songwriter James Pierpont's birthplace.

“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, noting that terms and phrases such as “Miss Fanny Bright” and “dashing through the snow” reference blackface dandies.

Photo: GIPHY

“Words such as ‘thro,’ ‘tho’t,’ and ‘upsot’ suggest a racialized performance that attempted to sound ‘southern’ to a northern audience,” continued Hamill in her paper.

“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, referencing her two years old paper. “Much research has been done on the problematic history of this nineteenth-century entertainment.”

Boston University

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