A New York Elementary School banned the song Jingle Bells over a possible connection to blackface.
Council Rock Primary School in Brighton banned the song citing a report from Boston University professor Kyna Hamill in 2017, in which she said that the first public performance of the song, 150 years ago, may have included singers in blackface.
“Jingle Bells,” Council Rock principal Matt Tappon wrote in an email to the Rochester Beacon, has been replaced with other songs that don’t have “the potential to be controversial or offensive.”
Tappon went on to cite Hamill’s research.
Hamill, however, was shocked to hear about the school’s ban.
“I am actually quite shocked the school would remove the song from the repertoire. … I, in no way, recommended that it stopped being sung by children,” she told the Beacon. “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.”
WTF