By Ben Zeisloft, Campus Reform

After discovering the tenets of what is referred to as “anti-racism,” one University of Nevada-Reno professor will stop teaching songs like “Jingle Bells” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

Kate Pollard — a senior music lecturer at the University of Nevada-Reno — wrote about her “anti-racist journey” in music education for Nevada Today, the school’s news outlet.

Referring to her first days as a middle school teacher in the late 1990s, Pollard wrote that “I don’t think I even knew what these songs were about, and I am fairly certain that none of my middle school students asked about their historical context.” However, when she “learned what authenticity and appropriateness meant in the mid-2000s,” she began to dive into “culturally relevant pedagogy.”

Between that time period and the present day, Pollard has had “many conversations and read a lot of literature on anti-racist curriculums and appropriation” She realized that “many of the songs I taught as a middle school educator and even as a college educator are not appropriate and even potentially harmful to certain peoples.”

Examples include “Jingle Bells,” “Shortnin’ Bread,” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” — all of which, according to Pollard, have links to “blackface minstrelsy.”

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