Usually “Jingle Bells”, and the tune to “Jingle Bells” is meant to invoke happiness, cheer and an overall feeling of Christmas. That is, until a bunch of Dover, N.H. High School students took the melody and changed it to the refrain “Let’s kill all the Blacks,” in an incident that has shocked the community.
According to the Fosters, the horrid video surfaced online over the weekend going viral, prompting an investigation. On Monday, in a letter to the school district, Superintendent William Harbron slammed the incident as one “of extreme racial insensitivity.”
“While the incident was part of a classroom assignment dealing with the reconstruction period in American history, the impact was harmful,” he wrote.
According to Harbron, the song was sung by students in an 11th grade U.S. history class who was studying the period following the civil war.
“They were given an assignment to select some event during reconstruction and to make a jingle out of it,” he said
The students picked the Ku Klux Klan, and I guess made a song to make the notorious hate group proud, writing the horrific lyrics to the tune of Jingle Bells. What’s worse, they got laughs out of it, although they did not know they were being recorded, according to the superintendent.
That begs the question as to what exactly they were learning in this history class if they thought anything about their little project was remotely appropriate.
Despite the horrid lyrics, Harbron and school principal Peter Driscoll claimed that they did not believe the students meant any harm.
Fosters writes:
But whether the assignment was appropriate and whether the students’ work was vetted along the way will be part of the review process, the school officials said. Harbron said with the benefit of hindsight, the educator could have stopped the song in the vetting process, or stopped it when the students were singing it and led a discussion of why it was not appropriate.
It still hasn’t been decided for some reason, if the students or the teacher would be disciplined for the incident.
“We’re still trying to sort it out at this point,” Harbron said. “Right now it’s getting the message out about what occurred, what we need to do differently, what can we learn from this, and how do we change our practices from the lessons learned so that everybody feels accepted and wanted here.”
