this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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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?
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.
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