So "Mary Poppins" is Racist.

Mac1958

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Dec 8, 2011
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Opposing Authoritarian Ideological Fundamentalism.
‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.
.
tmp_y6jcO2_625d419bb2fa2078_M4DMAPO_EC006.jpg
 
‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.
.
tmp_y6jcO2_625d419bb2fa2078_M4DMAPO_EC006.jpg
That isnt really what the article is saying. I havent read the books or seen the films so I cant comment on the content, But the writer does raise interesting points.
People can interpret thing in all ways because of the times we live in. So when I watch a commercial and hear white boy this and white boy that I know there is no animosity and hate. And the rap songs, oh the rap songs. And the one way comedy. And movies and TV programs with the same spiel. We have to many people with social justice degrees milking the system with easy lives while promoting racial conflict. Perhaps degrees in real jobs that are needed would improve things for us all. This is not removing obvious racial wrongs, this is removing the identity of the white race. And when it is replaced, you won't like the results.
 
‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.
.
tmp_y6jcO2_625d419bb2fa2078_M4DMAPO_EC006.jpg
That isnt really what the article is saying. I havent read the books or seen the films so I cant comment on the content, But the writer does raise interesting points.
People can interpret thing in all ways because of the times we live in. So when I watch a commercial and hear white boy this and white boy that I know there is no animosity and hate. And the rap songs, oh the rap songs. And the one way comedy. And movies and TV programs with the same spiel. We have to many people with social justice degrees milking the system with easy lives while promoting racial conflict. Perhaps degrees in real jobs that are needed would improve things for us all. This is not removing obvious racial wrongs, this is removing the identity of the white race. And when it is replaced, you won't like the results.
The article highlights the racist roots in the original book. You could argue that it was "of the time" when society itself was backward and unjust .I have some sympathy with that. The UK still had its colonies and the US still treated blacks as non citizens.
The literature of the time reflected this.I dont see any great artistic issues with removing racial slurs from kids books like Mary Poppins. But I would have a problem when it comes to great works of art like Huck Finn.
This is not a war on white people.Read the article.
 
Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.

did you actually read the article, Vichy Mac, where the original source material was kind of racist?

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.

Now, that said, the real problem is that Disney takes classic stories, softens them up, takes out all the nasty bits, leaves in all the cute bits and goes from there.

I remember my niece (who was 12 at the time) had a video of the 1943 BW version of the Jungle Book, and she remarked, "But this isn't the real Jungle Book by Walt Disney!"

To which I said, "Becky, you realize Walt Disney didn't write the Jungle Book, right?"

"Um... yeah" (Probably thinking, Uncle Joe's going off on a rant again!)

"Do you know who did write it?"

"Someone who wasn't Walt Disney!"

"Well, she got you there!" Her mom added.

The Jungle Book, of course was written by Rudyard Kipling, generally racist asshole noted for telling Americans to take up the "White Man's Burden" when we conquered the Philippines. (Most people remember his "White Man's Burden", but don't remember it was directed towards America).

In his original book, Mowgli goes back to his animal friends and gets them to attack and burn down the village that rejected him.

And don't even get me started on the Hunchback of Notre Dame.


Then Again, Vichy Mac would be defending "The Song of the South" if Disney re-released it.
 


Why did racist lefty use an Italian to portray as an "Indian" in those commercials.

The racist leftist environmentalists could not find an ACTUAL NATIVE AMERICAN?

What racists.

LOL
 
You have to wonder what it's like to go through life so ready to be offended into righteous indignation.

Mary freaking Poppins? And the piece goes into SUCH DETAIL.

This is like a virus, an expanding neurosis.

You mean recognizing that certain things that were acceptable when we used to be a lot more racist aren't acceptable now?

Yes.. that's terrible!

Vichy Mac is still upset he can't watch "Song of the South" anymore.

Here' Stormy, this should cheer you up.

 
‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.
.
tmp_y6jcO2_625d419bb2fa2078_M4DMAPO_EC006.jpg
That isnt really what the article is saying. I havent read the books or seen the films so I cant comment on the content, But the writer does raise interesting points.
People can interpret thing in all ways because of the times we live in. So when I watch a commercial and hear white boy this and white boy that I know there is no animosity and hate. And the rap songs, oh the rap songs. And the one way comedy. And movies and TV programs with the same spiel. We have to many people with social justice degrees milking the system with easy lives while promoting racial conflict. Perhaps degrees in real jobs that are needed would improve things for us all. This is not removing obvious racial wrongs, this is removing the identity of the white race. And when it is replaced, you won't like the results.
The article highlights the racist roots in the original book. You could argue that it was "of the time" when society itself was backward and unjust .I have some sympathy with that. The UK still had its colonies and the US still treated blacks as non citizens.
The literature of the time reflected this.I dont see any great artistic issues with removing racial slurs from kids books like Mary Poppins. But I would have a problem when it comes to great works of art like Huck Finn.
This is not a war on white people.Read the article.
There is a war on white people. From every angle accomplishments are being erased slowly. History should be a teacher also. Little things like a few years ago the U of Pa. literature school replaced an artifact/photo of Shakespeare with an African American woman. This is silly.
 
‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.
.
tmp_y6jcO2_625d419bb2fa2078_M4DMAPO_EC006.jpg
That isnt really what the article is saying. I havent read the books or seen the films so I cant comment on the content, But the writer does raise interesting points.
People can interpret thing in all ways because of the times we live in. So when I watch a commercial and hear white boy this and white boy that I know there is no animosity and hate. And the rap songs, oh the rap songs. And the one way comedy. And movies and TV programs with the same spiel. We have to many people with social justice degrees milking the system with easy lives while promoting racial conflict. Perhaps degrees in real jobs that are needed would improve things for us all. This is not removing obvious racial wrongs, this is removing the identity of the white race. And when it is replaced, you won't like the results.
The article highlights the racist roots in the original book. You could argue that it was "of the time" when society itself was backward and unjust .I have some sympathy with that. The UK still had its colonies and the US still treated blacks as non citizens.
The literature of the time reflected this.I dont see any great artistic issues with removing racial slurs from kids books like Mary Poppins. But I would have a problem when it comes to great works of art like Huck Finn.
This is not a war on white people.Read the article.
There is a war on white people. From every angle accomplishments are being erased slowly. History should be a teacher also. Little things like a few years ago the U of Pa. literature school replaced an artifact/photo of Shakespeare with an African American woman. This is silly.
Why is it silly ? Shakespeare doesnt give a fuck, his plays are still performed.
 
I couldn't read the article because of the paywall, but was the maid and the Hottentot reference the only "racist" thing in Mary Poppins? Sure, Disney pulled that quote when it did the movie, and it didn't hurt a thing. No movie follows the text exactly, and her comment didn't extend the narrative in any way. It was just a quip.

I don't agree with changing older literature to reflect modern mores. It was written when it was written and usually it reflects the times in which it was written. I still don't see the problem with Little Black Sambo, which I really liked as a little kid because it ended in pancakes with lots of butter, which was one of my favorites. And Sambo didn't get et, either.

Reading Little Black Sambo didn't make me racist--the fact that Sambo was black didn't send any messages to me except that it was a far away country that had tigers. The kid was black. SO WHAT?
 
‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

Dick Van Dyke plays a chimney sweep. But the soot on his face is racism.

More righteous hypersensitivity. The Regressive Left has lost its marbles.
.
tmp_y6jcO2_625d419bb2fa2078_M4DMAPO_EC006.jpg
That isnt really what the article is saying. I havent read the books or seen the films so I cant comment on the content, But the writer does raise interesting points.
People can interpret thing in all ways because of the times we live in. So when I watch a commercial and hear white boy this and white boy that I know there is no animosity and hate. And the rap songs, oh the rap songs. And the one way comedy. And movies and TV programs with the same spiel. We have to many people with social justice degrees milking the system with easy lives while promoting racial conflict. Perhaps degrees in real jobs that are needed would improve things for us all. This is not removing obvious racial wrongs, this is removing the identity of the white race. And when it is replaced, you won't like the results.
The article highlights the racist roots in the original book. You could argue that it was "of the time" when society itself was backward and unjust .I have some sympathy with that. The UK still had its colonies and the US still treated blacks as non citizens.
The literature of the time reflected this.I dont see any great artistic issues with removing racial slurs from kids books like Mary Poppins. But I would have a problem when it comes to great works of art like Huck Finn.
This is not a war on white people.Read the article.
There is a war on white people. From every angle accomplishments are being erased slowly. History should be a teacher also. Little things like a few years ago the U of Pa. literature school replaced an artifact/photo of Shakespeare with an African American woman. This is silly.
Why is it silly ? Shakespeare doesnt give a fuck, his plays are still performed.
Because you are shooting for excellence in the best of everything. Not being very good based on social justice. No back and forth on this. The world is about competition for the best of people especially. It doesn't mean you will get rich. We live in the same nation and Asia is slowly catching up to us and will surpass us within a couple of decades in excellence. Holding back the potential of our best people is suicide.
 
these people are insane
You have to wonder what it's like to go through life so ready to be offended into righteous indignation.

Mary freaking Poppins? And the piece goes into SUCH DETAIL.

This is like a virus, an expanding neurosis.
.
Sounds like a lit professor who needed to publish. That is what they do. Literary analysis.
 
I couldn't read the article because of the paywall, but was the maid and the Hottentot reference the only "racist" thing in Mary Poppins? Sure, Disney pulled that quote when it did the movie, and it didn't hurt a thing. No movie follows the text exactly, and her comment didn't extend the narrative in any way. It was just a quip.

I don't agree with changing older literature to reflect modern mores. It was written when it was written and usually it reflects the times in which it was written. I still don't see the problem with Little Black Sambo, which I really liked as a little kid because it ended in pancakes with lots of butter, which was one of my favorites. And Sambo didn't get et, either.

Reading Little Black Sambo didn't make me racist--the fact that Sambo was black didn't send any messages to me except that it was a far away country that had tigers. The kid was black. SO WHAT?

“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.

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.” 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.”

“Mary Poppins Returns,” set in the 1930s, seems to offer a more racially inclusive vision of the Banks’s London (at least among the working classes). But a key sequence of the film plays into a much more fraught history from a suppressed part of Mary Poppins’s past.

[Read
our review of “Mary Poppins Returns.”]

In Travers’s first “Mary Poppins” novel, published in 1934, a magic compass transports the children around the world, including a stop where they meet a scantily clad “negro lady,” dandling “a tiny black pickaninny with nothing on at all.” (“Pickaninny” has long been seen as an offensive term for a black child.) She addresses Mary Poppins in minstrel dialect and invokes the convention of blacking up: “My, but dem’s very white babies. You wan’ use a li’l bit black boot polish on dem.”

This episode proved so controversial that the book was banned by the San Francisco Public Library, prompting Travers to drop the racialized dialogue and change the offending caricature to an animal. (A number of British authors built on the tradition of turning American minstrelsy into animal fables: Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne both cited Uncle Remus dialect stories, including “Br’er Rabbit” tales, as inspiration.)

In Travers’s 1981 revision, the “negro lady” became a hyacinth macaw who speaks genteel English. Travers, who was born in Australia to Anglo-Irish parents, claimed that black children loved reading the “pickaninny dialect” in her book, but that she made the change because she didn’t wish to see “Mary Poppins tucked away in a closet” by meddlesome adults.

“A Cover Is Not the Book,”which retells stories from Travers’s novels. One of these verses refers to a wealthy widow called Hyacinth Macaw, and the kicker is that she’s naked: Blunt sings that “she only wore a smile,” and Miranda chimes in, “plus two feathers and a leaf.”

In the 1981 revision of “Mary Poppins,” there’s no mention of her attire; you’d have to go back to the 1934 original to find the “negro lady” with “a very few clothes on,” sitting under a palm tree with a “crown of feathers.” There’s even a straw hut behind Blunt and Miranda that replicates Mary Shepard’s 1934 illustration. (The hut was removed in the 1981 revision.)

The lesson of this music hall number is that “a king may be a crook,” a clue that Colin Firth’s kindly banker in the film might be more nefarious. As Eric Lott and other cultural historians have documented, there was an important connection between blackface performance and American and British working-class audiences; minstrelsy offered both a chance to define their whiteness in opposition to black caricature and to thumb their noses at employers through the minstrels’ antics.

When T.D. Rice, a popular white minstrel performer, crossed the Atlantic in the 1830s, his manager recalledthat he inspired chimney sweeps and apprentices, who “wheeled about and turned about and jumped Jim Crow, from morning until night, to the annoyance of their masters, but the great delight of the cockneys.”

These chimney sweeps with minstrel dances were only a step in time away from Dick Van Dyke’s soot-faced Bert, needling the admiral on the rooftop, or Miranda’s lamplighter in “Mary Poppins Returns,” who worked for Bert as a child. The minstrel stage convention of the “pickaninny” rendered black slave children as cheery performers who, the historian Robin Bernstein argues, were “comically impervious to pain” inflicted by their labor. Similarly, the dark-lit grins and unflappable footwork of the lamplighters turn their dangerous labor into comic play; “smile and smirk,” they sing, is Cockney rhyming slang for “work.”

“Mickey’s Mellerdrammer,” Mickey blacks his face with dynamite to play Topsy, a crazy-haired, raggedy-dressed, comically unruly black child from the book whose name had become synonymous with the pickaninny stereotype.


Mickey Mouse as Topsy in a 1933 short.CreditDisney

merlin_149741811_e83926a8-0223-4d4e-abac-3406a04e2459-articleLarge.jpg


In “Mary Poppins Returns,” the name of the crazy-haired, raggedy-dressed, comically unruly character (played by Meryl Streep) is also Topsy. She’s a variation on a Mr. Turvy in the novel “Mary Poppins Comes Back” (1935), whose workshop flips upside-down.

Even if these characters’ shared name is accidental, it speaks to a larger point: Disney has long evoked minstrelsy for its topsy-turvy entertainments — a nanny blacking up, chimney sweeps mocking the upper classes, grinning lamplighters turning work into song.

In this latest version, Mary Poppins might be serenading Disney genres, outdated but strangely recurring, in the Oscar-nominated song “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” when she reminds us that “Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place.”
 
I just read the article. I was shocked to learn that the movie has not been banned and the producers arrested for their horrible crimes! Silly Mac.

The author simply takes us through an historical perspective of the Mary Poppins story and Disney's approach regarding mistrel characters over time. It wasn't even critical.

Go see the film, Mac. Take some young family members along. Take a stand against tyranny!
 
I couldn't read the article because of the paywall, but was the maid and the Hottentot reference the only "racist" thing in Mary Poppins? Sure, Disney pulled that quote when it did the movie, and it didn't hurt a thing. No movie follows the text exactly, and her comment didn't extend the narrative in any way. It was just a quip.

It wasn't. And in fact, the books have been rewritten by the Author herself to expunge the more questionable stuff.

I don't agree with changing older literature to reflect modern mores. It was written when it was written and usually it reflects the times in which it was written. I still don't see the problem with Little Black Sambo, which I really liked as a little kid because it ended in pancakes with lots of butter, which was one of my favorites. And Sambo didn't get et, either.

Reading Little Black Sambo didn't make me racist--the fact that Sambo was black didn't send any messages to me except that it was a far away country that had tigers. The kid was black. SO WHAT?

Except Tigers don't live in Africa, so there's that.

upload_2019-4-21_6-44-7.jpeg


And Sambo was used as a racial slur for decades.
 
I just read the article. I was shocked to learn that the movie has not been banned and the producers arrested for their horrible crimes! Silly Mac.

The author simply takes us through an historical perspective of the Mary Poppins story and Disney's approach regarding mistrel characters over time. It wasn't even critical.

Go see the film, Mac. Take some young family members along. Take a stand against tyranny!

Mac still thinks the PC Police are hiding under his bed!

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