​​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,…
  • 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
                    25·
                    10 months ago

                    Passive aggressiveness, nice!

                    That’s not passive aggressiveness; it’s condescension. Passive aggressiveness would be like hiding a spouse’s favorite condiments after an argument or intentionally being late to a meeting with someone you don’t like. It’s being indirectly mean or hurtful. I’m very direct, by comparison.

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

                    A truly fascinating hill to die on. I’m gonna bet you’re a BIG Brandon Sanderson and J. K. Rowling fan. Maybe a little Stephen King if you want to be adventurous.

      • 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.”