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Some upstate New York residents are riled up after there were no “Jingle Bells” on Christmas, with the holiday song banned by a local school because of its ties to 19th century blackface minstrel shows.
Council Rock Primary School had axed “Jingle Bells” from the school’s holiday repertoire because the holiday mainstay may have been first performed at minstrel shows in 1857, according to an academic article from Boston University professor Kyna Hamill published in 2017.
The school replaced the tune with others that don’t have “the potential to be controversial or offensive,” Council Rock principal Matt Tappon told The Rochester Beacon, who first reported the news on Dec. 23.
Brighton Central School District Superintendent Kevin McGowan defended the decision amid the lingering outcry from people who condemned the school for killing a popular, seemingly harmless holiday tradition.
“This wasn’t ‘liberalism gone amok’ or ‘cancel culture at its finest’ as some have suggested,” he said in a letter posted to the district website.
“Nobody has said you shouldn’t sing ‘Jingle Bells’ or ever in any way suggested that to your children. I can assure you that this situation is not an attempt to push an agenda.”
McGowan said “This is not a political situation, it was a simple, thoughtful curricular decision” adding that teachers were not “discussing politics about the song or anything regarding its history” with the school’s students, who are in kindergarten through second grade.
Hamill, whose article apparently inspired the decision, wrote in an email to the Beacon that she was “actually quite shocked the school would remove the song from the repertoire… I, in no way, recommended that it stopped being sung by children.
“My article tried to tell the story of the first performance of the song, I do not connect this to the popular Christmas tradition of singing the song now,” she continued.
“The very fact of (“Jingle Bells’”) popularity has to do (with) the very catchy melody of the song, and not to be only understood in terms of its origins in the minstrel tradition. … I would say it should very much be sung and enjoyed, and perhaps discussed.”
But the superintendent’s message said “Jingle Bells” wasn’t likely to have been on the curriculum in the first place.
He wrote, “it may seem silly to some, but the fact that ‘Jingle Bells’ was first performed in minstrel shows where white actors performed in blackface does actually matter when it comes to questions of what we use as material in school.
“I’m glad that our staff paused when learning of this, reflected, and decided to use different material to accomplish the same objective in class,” he said. “Our staff found that their simple objective could be accomplished by singing any one of many songs in class and therefore they chose to simply choose other songs.”
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