Meenie Research Paper

Children everywhere know popular nursery rhymes which they tend to use on the playground. One song they might sing is “Eenie, Meenie.” The song became very popular when kids needed to pick the person who would be “it” for a recess game, since it provided a fun rhyme to go along with making the random pick. Although seeming innocent, many children's songs have been changed because of their past renditions being R rated for kids to be saying. And “Eenie, Meenie” is one song that has a grueling history. This may just seem like a fun nursery rhyme; however the past behind it is much more cruel and hateful. However most children songs don’t simply vanish, but instead people will alter the wording to make it much more acceptable. Around the early 1940s to 1950s the best know alternate version of the song had started to become widely known. It started more as a racist slur with the second line having a negative word of African Americans used during the time of slavery. The full rhyme is as follows: Eenie, meenie, miny, mo,

Jeremy Clarkson who was renowned as a host on a very popular BBC show Top Gear, had gotten himself in a lot of trouble because of him saying the original rhyme on air. The show aired on February 2013 and in the episode Jeremy found himself deciding between two cars. So the only was he thought to pick between them was to sing Eenie, meenie, miny mo (Halliday). While singing the nursery rhyme he mumbled the original line to the song. The result was that everyone thought of him as a racist old man who shouldn’t be working on the show anymore. He came out to say it was his bad, but people still don’t think it was okay for him to get away with it. In today’s culture it is still very unacceptable to be even using the [N-Word] especially if it was in an old racist nursery