Posted on 01/30/2019 3:47:33 PM PST by TigerClaws
“Mary Poppins Returns,” which picked up four Oscar nominations last week, is an enjoyably derivative film that seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent fantasies of childhood, as well as the jolly holidays that the first “Mary Poppins” film conjured for many adult viewers.
Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition that persists throughout the Mary Poppins canon, from P. L. Travers’s books to Disney’s 1964 adaptation, with disturbing echoes in the studio’s newest take on the material, “Mary Poppins Returns.”
One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up. When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker. Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You cannot talk to people like this. One has to try very hard to be this stupid.
The racist is the one who is obsessed by race.
Fun fact: The first modern medically recognized occupational ‘injury’ is an affliction known as “chimney-sweep scrotum”. The english habit of lowering young naked boys on rope harnesses into chimneys to scrub off the creosote laden soot caused carcinomas on their private parts.
Well... dang, I’ve reached my limit of viewing NYT articles. I’m so so so so sad.
And yes they are mentally ill.
Er, naked? You sure about that part?
Here I thought a story that includes a chimney sweep covered in soot was just that.
This just goes to show racism is EVERYWHERE!
When I was a young man our lumber mill burned down and I chain sawed all the charred lumber and remains into fireplace sized chunks and gave them away over the winter. We still had to haul a hundred dump trucks loads of filth away. It was very dirty work and I looked like I was wearing black face at the end of every day for many months. I guess that I can kiss goodbye any chance I had of getting into politics.
That sounded so egregiously awful that I looked it up on Wikipedia to make sure it's for real.
It is. Yikes.
“Well... dang, I’ve reached my limit of viewing NYT articles.”
probably just need to delete their cookies and all will be well ... if that doesn’t work, install noscript on firefox ...
He's right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney_sweeps%27_carcinoma
There was an article in the AZ newspaper written by a black triggered by seeing a photo of soot covered coal miners in a restaurant.
How far do you have to dig to be offended?
This guy is an English/Gender Studies/Shakespeare prof at Linfield College, a small college in Oregon. I’m guessing he likes to examine historical works to claim racism or homophobia. Moonbat liberal.
bookmark
everybody should understand that this isn’t a black face routine, it’s a routine dealing with victorian age chimney sweepers.
There was an article in the AZ newspaper written by a black triggered by seeing a photo of soot covered coal miners in a restaurant.
Eddie Murphy and the Wayans brothers should be hanged, drawn and quartered for playing in whiteface.
When I was in the Army in Germany in the mid-70s, we drove our tanks along the graveled tank trails at the Grafenwoehr Training Area north of Nuremberg, Bavaria. After a couple of miles all of us were coated in a light grey/white dust from the tank trails. All of the solders, white and black had white faces and exposed skin and uniforms. I guess the Black soldiers can be charged with “wearing white face.”
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