One’s first impulse is to say: of course! Everything that Americans like is racist.
More specifically, defrocked MSNBC host Joy Reid is alleging that the song “Jingle Bells” is racist:
In the video she shared to her 1.3 million Instagram followers, a man in a Christmas sweater and Santa hat stands on the streets of Medford, Massachusetts near a plaque [that] marks the site where James Lord Pierpont is believed to have penned the song in 1850.
He takes off his hat disapprovingly and scowls at the plaque, the video caption reading “this is where a racist Confederate soldier wrote ‘Jingle Bells’ to make fun of black people, and has its origins in bigoted minstrel shows that were popular at the time.
James Lord Pierpont (the uncle of JP Morgan, coincidentally) was the son of a Massachusetts abolitionist who found himself in Georgia at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and ultimately enlisted in a Georgia Confederate unit. He wrote “Jingle Bells,” based presumably on his experiences in Massachusetts and not Georgia, some time between 1850 and 1857.
Is there something “racist” about “Jingle Bells”? Obviously not. There is nothing about race, about blacks, about anything politically controversial in it. No one listening to “Jingle Bells” has ever had, as a result, negative thoughts about blacks or any other ethnic group. And the sleigh rides celebrated in that song were a feature of life in 19th century Massachusetts that was almost entirely white. Maybe that is the problem. For liberals, white = racist. Stupid, obviously, but that is how they think.
The real question is, why do leftists like Joy Reid continue to ring the “racism” bell at every opportunity? There is nothing racist about “Jingle Bells” except that the song has long been popular with Americans, most of whom–despite wailing and gnashing of teeth from liberals–are white. So what? These days, pretty much every cultural artifact that liberals denounce as “racist” has zero connection, at all, to race. That doesn’t bother liberals, but it should bother the rest of us. Increasingly, being “racist,” in the lexicon of the Democratic Party, means being American.
