Look, if there's one thing we've learned over the years, it's that nothing says "holiday spirit" quite like a former cable news host dredging up century-and-a-half-old minstrel show trivia to declare war on a tune that's been jingling bells since before the Civil War. Enter Joy Reid, the ex-MSNBC personality who parted ways with "The ReidOut" earlier this year, timing that, let's be honest, feels like a gift to anyone tired of prime-time grievance theater.
She's got 1.3 million Instagran followers hanging on her every biased repost, and this week, she decided to drop a Yuletide bombshell: "Jingle Bells" isn't just a sleigh ride classic; it's a covert Confederate dog whistle mocking Black folks.
The clip she shared, now going viral faster than fruitcake at a family gathering, features some guy decked out in a Santa hat and ugly Christmas sweater, eyeballing a plaque in Medford, Massachusetts, where James Lord Pierpont supposedly penned the ditty back in 1857. "This is where a racist Confederate soldier wrote ‘Jingle Bells’ to make fun of Black people," blares the on-screen caption, like a Black Friday sale sign for outrage.
The clip she shared, now going viral faster than fruitcake at a family gathering, features some guy decked out in a Santa hat and ugly Christmas sweater, eyeballing a plaque in Medford, Massachusetts, where James Lord Pierpont supposedly penned the ditty back in 1857. "This is where a racist Confederate soldier wrote ‘Jingle Bells’ to make fun of Black people," blares the on-screen caption, like a Black Friday sale sign for outrage.
The video piles on: Pierpont was broke, so he whipped up the original "One Horse Open Sleigh" for minstrel gigs where white actors in blackface lampooned Black people fumbling through winter frolics. Oh, and get this—Pierpont later ditched his abolitionist kin up North to fight for the Stars and Bars, cranking out pro-slavery anthems on the side.
Reid, never one to let a good grievance go unamplified, slapped her own caption on it: "Lord have mercy." That's her way of saying, "See? Even Santa's got skeletons in the sleigh." The video name-drops a 2017 Cambridge University Press paper, "The Story I Must Tell: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire," where author Kyna Hamill observes, "The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is, as we shall see, a prime example of a common misreading of much popular music from the nineteenth century." Hamill adds, "Its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history."
Fair enough; history's messy, and minstrelsy was a vile stain on 19th-century pop culture. But here's the kicker, and it's a big one: Hamill herself has been pushing back hard against this exact spin for years. Back in 2017, she told the Boston Herald flat-out, "I never said it was racist now," stressing that her work zeros in on the song's performance history and origins, not some grand verdict on Pierpont's authorial intent or a call to cancel carols. She's not out here auditioning for the Grinch; she's a theater historian unpacking how tunes like this got sanitized over time. Yet here we are, 2025, with Reid's repost breathing fresh life into the distortion, turning academic nuance into social media napalm, because everything in Joy's joyless mind is racist if you can think it so.
Over on Fox's "Outnumbered," panel treated Reid's share like the latest front in the endless culture skirmish. And the X-verse is lit up like a Christmas tree on fire, with people blasting out parodies ("Jingle bells, Joy Reid smells...") and eye-rolls about how this is peak "race-baiting rhetoric" from a woman who seems constitutionally incapable of spotting a silver lining without first hunting for the tarnish. Her allegiance bias in all her reporting over the years is obvious as she sees racism in every story.
At the end of the day, if we're cherry-picking 1850s sheet music to torch holiday playlists, what's next, banning "Rudolph" for bullying the differently nosed?
Reid, never one to let a good grievance go unamplified, slapped her own caption on it: "Lord have mercy." That's her way of saying, "See? Even Santa's got skeletons in the sleigh." The video name-drops a 2017 Cambridge University Press paper, "The Story I Must Tell: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire," where author Kyna Hamill observes, "The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is, as we shall see, a prime example of a common misreading of much popular music from the nineteenth century." Hamill adds, "Its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history."
Fair enough; history's messy, and minstrelsy was a vile stain on 19th-century pop culture. But here's the kicker, and it's a big one: Hamill herself has been pushing back hard against this exact spin for years. Back in 2017, she told the Boston Herald flat-out, "I never said it was racist now," stressing that her work zeros in on the song's performance history and origins, not some grand verdict on Pierpont's authorial intent or a call to cancel carols. She's not out here auditioning for the Grinch; she's a theater historian unpacking how tunes like this got sanitized over time. Yet here we are, 2025, with Reid's repost breathing fresh life into the distortion, turning academic nuance into social media napalm, because everything in Joy's joyless mind is racist if you can think it so.
Over on Fox's "Outnumbered," panel treated Reid's share like the latest front in the endless culture skirmish. And the X-verse is lit up like a Christmas tree on fire, with people blasting out parodies ("Jingle bells, Joy Reid smells...") and eye-rolls about how this is peak "race-baiting rhetoric" from a woman who seems constitutionally incapable of spotting a silver lining without first hunting for the tarnish. Her allegiance bias in all her reporting over the years is obvious as she sees racism in every story.
At the end of the day, if we're cherry-picking 1850s sheet music to torch holiday playlists, what's next, banning "Rudolph" for bullying the differently nosed?
Reid's got her lane, and it's paved with perpetual victimhood, but maybe, just maybe, we can let "Jingle Bells" jingle on without the scarlet letter. After all, the real horror show isn't American history, it's pretending every old lyric is a personal attack on the present.
Dashing through the snow with a little less sanctimony? Now that would be music to anyone's ears.
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