Joy Reid reposts viral video claiming ‘Jingle Bells’ song is racist

Former MSNBC host Pleasure Reid took situation with a well-liked Christmas music and reposted a video describing the beloved tune as racist. The now viral clip has put the carol’s previous underneath renewed scrutiny, as the tutorial on whose analysis the video is predicated says that was not her intention.

Within the video, a person in festive apparel stares at a plaque in Medford, Massachusetts, the place James Lord Pierpont is claimed to have written what grew to become generally known as “Jingle Bells.”

The video makes the argument that early performances of the music had been used to “mock” black individuals. Pierpont’s historical past is then mentioned utilizing racial dialect and insults in different works. The clip additionally notes that the author later fought for the Accomplice military in protection of slavery.

Pleasure-Ann Reid speaks on stage through the Congressional Black Caucus Basis’s annual Legislative Convention Nationwide City Corridor on the Walter E. Washington Conference Heart in Washington, DC, on September 25. (Leigh Vogel/Getty Pictures for Congressional Black Caucus Basis)

“That is the place a racist Accomplice soldier wrote ‘Jingle Bells’ to make enjoyable of black individuals,” reads the primary caption on the display.

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The video states that Pierpont was strapped for money and wrote the unique model, “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” for performances by which white actors in blackface caricatured black individuals “making an attempt to take part in winter actions.”

Reid, who misplaced her MSNBC present “The ReidOut” earlier this 12 months, reposted the clip to her 1.3 million Instagram followers, writing, “Lord, have mercy.” The video quotes a 2017 Cambridge College Press article titled “The Story I Should Inform: ‘Jingle Bells’ within the Minstrel Repertoire.”

“The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is, as we are going to see, instance of a standard misinterpretation of a lot in style music of the nineteenth century,” writer Kyna Hamill writes within the research.

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“Its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically erased from historical past,” she added.

Pleasure Reid speaks onstage on the 2025 ESSENCE Black Ladies in Hollywood Awards held on February 27 on the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, California. (Leon Bennett/Getty Pictures for ESSENCE)

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Nonetheless, Hamill has repeatedly mentioned that her work is misrepresented and that she has by no means claimed that “Jingle Bells” was written as a racist slur. She claims that her analysis focuses on the music’s efficiency historical past and the place it got here from, moderately than Pierpont’s intentions in composing it.

‘I by no means mentioned it was racist’ Hamill told the Boston Herald in 2017including that she did not wish to dictate what songs are sung at Christmas.