​​NEW YORK—Standing before a crowd of millennials, Gen Xers, and baby boomers, members of Generation Z announced at a press conference Wednesday that actress Julie Andrews was problematic, but they refused to explain why. “You know what she did—you just don’t want to admit it,” said Gen Z spokesperson Taylor Collaco,…
  • pimento64@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    512·
    10 months ago

    Is the chimney sweep routine really blackface, or is it just classist humor at the expense of impoverished white people who had the shittiest job outside of coal mining?

    • rwhitisissle@lemy.lolEnglish
      1320·
      10 months ago

      The original novel had a racist element to the chimney sweeps. The film departs from that, but its source material is about as racist for what you would expect of a novel from that time period. There was some minor controversy where some English professor accused the film of racism: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mary-poppins-racist/

      That said, I refuse to ever say anything that might be construed as defending racism in any form, and suggesting that a work of art exists as a cultural artifact of often contested ideological beliefs of the time and place it was created, possessing creative merits independent of its source material or even particular one-off attributes that may have aged poorly when viewed in the light of contemporary discourse, comes dangerously close to outright apologia in the eyes of your more insufferable pearl clutchers on the internet.

      So, yeah, Mary Poppins is definitely racist. Why? Well, it’s not my job to educate you, that’s why.

      • LilB0kChoy@midwest.socialEnglish
        13·
        10 months ago

        Do you realize the whole second paragraph of your comment is one sentence…

        (the extra . are in case you need them)

            • rwhitisissle@lemy.lolEnglish
              25·
              10 months ago

              No, but he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and his writing style emphasizes famously long sentences, some of them stretching for pages.

                • rwhitisissle@lemy.lolEnglish
                  27·
                  10 months ago

                  Eh, you’ll probably like him once you read him. They teach his books a lot in high school English, so you’ll maybe get some exposure in…I’m gonna guess 5 years or so.

                  • LilB0kChoy@midwest.socialEnglish
                    7·
                    10 months ago

                    Passive aggressiveness, nice!

                    I won’t be reading his works, mostly because I prefer authors that use proper English grammar.

                    Buck up kiddo, you’ll get ‘em next time!

        • rwhitisissle@lemy.lolEnglish
          9·
          10 months ago

          From the snopes article you obviously didn’t read:

          This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: “If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,” she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen.

          The 1964 film replays this racial panic in a farcical key. When the dark figures of the chimney sweeps step in time on a roof, a naval buffoon, Admiral Boom, shouts, “We’re being attacked by Hottentots!” and orders his cannon to be fired at the “cheeky devils" [see below]. We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans; they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. It’s a parody of black menace; it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy. And it’s not only fools like the Admiral who invoke this language. In the 1952 novel “Mary Poppins in the Park,” the nanny herself tells an upset young Michael, “I understand that you’re behaving like a Hottentot.”