‘Mary Poppins is racist’: PC or satire?
Right-on culture warriors seem to be taking their cue from satirical Twitter accounts.
Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter.
A writer in the New York Times has accused the 1964 Disney film version of Mary Poppins of racism. According to academic Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Poppins is ‘shamefulling flirting with blackface’ when she gets covered in soot during the famous ‘Step in Time’ number. ‘Instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks and gets even blacker’, he writes.
Pollack-Pelzner isn’t the only person recently to take offence at soot. On the same day the NYT ran his piece, a writer at ‘AZ Central’, a news site in Phoenix, Arizona, published a piece complaining about an old photograph in a restaurant that depicted soot-faced coal miners. ‘Phoenix restaurant says this is a photo of coal miners. But I see offensive blackface’, reads the headline.
As PC bores have set about taking offence at even the most inoffensive of cultural works, it has become a cliché to say that their screeds have become indistinguishable from satire. But as spiked columnist Andrew Doyle points out, that is literally the case with Julie Andrews and the ‘minstrel’ miners. Godfrey Elfwick and Titania McGrath, two satirical ‘woke’ Twitter characters, actually got there first:
What is going on?!
Godfrey Elfwick tweeted about miners in blackface years ago & now this story appears in @azcentral.@TitaniaMcGrath tweeted a post about Mary Poppins being guilty of blackface in September 2018, now we have this in @nytimes.
Are these satirists or prophets? pic.twitter.com/M9N9OwNGrQ
— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) January 30, 2019
They say truth is stranger than fiction. Well, woke politics is now at least as strange as satire.
Picture by: YouTube.
HELP US HIT OUR 1% TARGET
spiked is funded by you. It’s your generosity that keeps us going and growing.
Only 0.1% of our regular readers currently donate to spiked. If you are one of the 99.9% who appreciates what we do, but hasn’t given just yet, please consider making a donation today.
If just 1% of our loyal readers donated regularly, it would be transformative for us, allowing us to vastly expand our team and coverage.
Plus, if you donate £5 a month or £50 a year, you can join and enjoy:
–Ad-free reading
–Exclusive bonus content
–Regular events
–Access to our comments section
The most impactful way to support spiked’s journalism is by registering as a supporter and making a monthly contribution. Thank you.
Comments
Want to join the conversation?
Only spiked supporters and patrons, who donate regularly to us, can comment on our articles.