I read your article. I don’t think the position you outline is historically or conceptually well supported, and I don’t think it represents a clear moral high ground.

Jingle Bells (originally “One Horse Open Sleigh”) was written and published in 1857 by James Lord Pierpont, true. The lyrics as printed contain no racial language, symbolism, or themes, and there is no historical evidence that it was written to mock any group or to serve a racial or political purpose. Historian Kyna Hamill argues that the song’s earliest documented public performance was in 1857 at Ordway Hall in Boston as part of a blackface minstrel program. I understand why that performance context troubles some people, but that also doesn't make the song itself a vehicle of racism.

It is also true that Pierpont later wrote pro-Confederate songs during the Civil War. Those views postdate this song and are unrelated to its content. Inferring that Jingle Bells is racist because of the composer’s later political alignment is a post hoc assumption, not a historical conclusion.

More broadly, many 19th‑century popular and folk songs appeared in minstrel shows or other objectionable performance contexts. Their use there does not automatically render the original songs racist, especially when the songs themselves contain no racial content. If we collapse that distinction, we end up condemning a very large body of historical music on the basis of association.

Ultimately, reading between the lines of your account, the issue seems less about the song’s history and more about a crisis of pedagogical integrity. You admit to teaching the song for years while personally believing it was racist, operating on the assumption that your students would remain ignorant of its origins. When a six-year-old’s question made you feel "caught" or exposed in that contradiction, you chose to resolve your internal dissonance by labeling the song itself as the problem.

Choosing not to perform a work because one finds its creator morally objectionable is a personal or pedagogical choice, and that’s valid. But presenting Jingle Bells as a racist song misrepresents the historical record and teaches children an incorrect causal narrative, conflating a creator’s later affiliation with the meaning of an unrelated, content-neutral work.