A professor at Linfield College is catching slack for branding the classic 1964 Mary Poppins film racist.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a gender studies professor in Oregon, sharply criticizes the scene in Mary Poppins where actress Julie Andrews joins Dick Van Dyke's chimneysweep Bert to dance on the rooftop. Both get covered in soot as they dance to "Step in Time."
"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," Pollack-Pelzner writes in The New York Times.
"This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if [PL] Travers' 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).
"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.'
"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."
Downtown Abbey writer Julian Fellowes, who put together a stage production of the film, said all Poppins wants to do "is join the sweeps and show them she isn't standing apart – that she wants to belong to that group."
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