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Okay! Here we go.
So, over the course of the last week, the social justice squadrons have been very busy
sifting through the minutiae of their surroundings, in order to squeeze out something to be offended by.
This week’s in vogue cardinal sin; racism, most notably,
Now, nobody can deny that historical blackface, that is, minstrel shows, is extremely offensive.
It was associated with the deliberate parody and unpersoning of black Americans for a number of years.
So the resentment still felt today towards it, and the social taboo around wearing blackface
is totally understandable.
But that ain’t the kinda blackface I’m talking about.
On January 28th, an article appeared in the New York times, of course, by American academic
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.
He claimed that the beloved children’s series of books, Mary Poppins, as well as the 1964
classic movie, were terribly racist.
According to Pollack-Pelzner, in the case of the movie, that iconic scene where Mary
dances on the rooftops with the chimney sweeps to the song Step in Time -- which is a scene that is loved by everyone
that is actually racist propaganda because Mary and the chimney sweeps have black soot on their faces.
Now, to your average, non-hysterical, not perpetually offended mature adult, this soot is
symbolic of the fact they’re up chimneys all day, cleaning out, well, the soot.
It’s a by-product of their profession, and therefore historically accurate.
However, in the regressive-leftist social justice academic bubble of Daniel Pollack-Pelzner,
it’s blackface.
This guy has taken one of the best films ever made, with two of the most beloved
performers in history in Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke
which is set in London at the turn of the 20th century and written by an Australian woman
and somehow made it racist against black Americans.
This is doubly ironic when you consider Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is about the whitest guy you will ever see.
So, how does this guy justify his claim?
“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.”
Okay, I don’t know about you, but I always interpreted Mary powdering her nose in black
as a joking, ironic reference poking fun at the fact that she is constantly powdering
her nose throughout the rest of the film, and also as a statement of solidarity with
the chimney sweeps.
The prim and proper, middle class Mary, usually so squeaky clean, is dropping her airs and
graces to enter the underground world of the London working class.
This therefore gives little Jane and Michael, who are so privileged, a taste of what it’s
like beneath them on the social pecking order, thus challenging the snobbery they both instinctively
exhibit when confronted with Bert the first time he appears before them covered in soot.
So, from my interpretation, this sends a positive message that no matter who we are, we are
all somehow connected in our shared humanity, and nobody is more valuable than anyone else.
It’s an anti-classism reference.
However, this bored academic has chosen to eschew this lovely uplifting message because no
It’s blackface, it’s racist, and everybody should condemn the movie, the books, and the
author for ever existing.
The other thing Pollack-Pelzner tries to condemn is that the book uses language that has racially
charged connotations.
“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
Now, is this language, in isolation, racist?
Well, possibly. However, context is important here.
The first book was written in 1934, a time that was very, very socially different
from 2019.
That kind of language was in common parlance in those days, and reflective of the social
values of the time.
A mature person with even a single grain of critical thinking skills could look at that,
compartmentalize it, and enjoy the story while marvelling at how far we have come
in our social values in such a comparatively short space of time.
Not screech about it and write some pointless op-ed in the New York Times that everybody
is making fun of anyway.
A similar thing has happened in Phoenix, Arizona.
On January 28th, poet and essayist Rashaad Thomas published an article in the Arizona Central
detailing his experience at a downtown Phoenix restaurant.
Thomas spied a photo on the wall of Welsh coal miners hanging out at the pub after work.
As you can see, the coal miners faces are covered in black coal dust, because, you know,
they’re coal miners who have just come out of a coal mine and as such would be covered
in coal dust, which happens to be black.
And yet, for some reason, and regardless of his knowledge of the very blatant historical
context here, Thomas decided that the photo represented men in blackface, and was therefore
racist and a threat to his very existence “At the downtown Phoenix restaurant, my
concern that the photograph of men in blackface was a threat to me and my face and voice were
ignored.
A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, “Whites Only.”
It says people like me are not welcome.
Aside from the fact these two incidents induce much face-palming and noises of frustration
they highlight something I’ve been mulling over about the regressives social justice, NPC left for a quite some time
They are happy to boycott facts, context and historical accuracy, and depict history, art, and anything
else as sanitized, rather than confronting the fact that much of history was, well, bad,
and full of inequality, if it will make them feel warm and fuzzy.
We saw a similar thing when a journalist at USA Today said there should have been more women and
people of colour in the movie Dunkirk.
It’s also evident in the new movie Mary Queen of Scots, when very, very Caucasian
historical figures, are played by black and Asian actors, because director Josie Rourke said she refused to direct an all white period drama
This is in spite of the fact fact that there would have been nobody other than white people in the middle and upper ranks
of the royal court in Elizabethan times.
We can draw similar parallels to this regressive leftist obsession with
changing the date of Australia Day, or tearing down confederate statues
or flying the Indigenous flag in Parliament or ditching the pledge of allegiance.
They want to present history as a sort of Socialist Utopia, just in case depicting the real thing may
possibly offend someone, somewhere, somehow.
You can’t change the past, you can only learn from it.
And taking offence to singular lines in books written in the 1930s and 40s, or projecting
your own racial victim fantasies onto people whose faces are incidentally, not deliberately,
covered with black soot, is juvenile.
Think of it this way; if I took issue with every single negative
or sexist comment made about women in past films, then I probably wouldn’t watch a film made before
the year 2000.
But, because I am enough of a grown up to recognize context and compartmentalise meaning,
I can still watch the films and not getting offended.
It is only the silliest and saddest of people who are unable both.