With Disney's latest Mary Poppins adventure – "Mary Poppins Returns," starring actors Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda – racking up Oscar nominations last week, The New York Times has run an op-ed condemning the classic flick for being "bound up in a blackface performance tradition."
"Part of the new film's nostalgia," argues Daniel Pollack-Pelzner at the Times, "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.'"
The 1964 adaptation of "Mary Poppins" starring iconic actors Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke includes a scene wherein the magical nanny gets soot on her pristine face. Andrews, playing Poppins, powders her face with more soot and leads the Banks children and Van Dyke, playing a charming chimney sweep named Bert, on a march across London rooftops.
Pollack-Pelzner reluctantly admits that the scene is innocuous enough, though he ties it to roots of blackface and accuses "Mary Poppins Returns" of evoking minstrelsy and keeping with supposed Disney tradition.
"This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers's novels didn't associate chimney sweeps' blackened faces with racial caricature," he writes. "'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."
"Part of the new film's nostalgia," argues Daniel Pollack-Pelzner at the Times, "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.'"
The 1964 adaptation of "Mary Poppins" starring iconic actors Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke includes a scene wherein the magical nanny gets soot on her pristine face. Andrews, playing Poppins, powders her face with more soot and leads the Banks children and Van Dyke, playing a charming chimney sweep named Bert, on a march across London rooftops.
Pollack-Pelzner reluctantly admits that the scene is innocuous enough, though he ties it to roots of blackface and accuses "Mary Poppins Returns" of evoking minstrelsy and keeping with supposed Disney tradition.
"This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers's novels didn't associate chimney sweeps' blackened faces with racial caricature," he writes. "'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."
