In the 1952 novel Mary Poppins in the Park, the nanny herself tells an upset young Michael, ‘I understand that you’re behaving like a Hottentot.’” And it’s not only fools like the Admiral who invoke this language. It’s a parody of black menace it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy. “We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. 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.’ “The 1964 film replays this racial panic in a farcical key. 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. “’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. “This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature,” he writes. Pollack-Pelzner flatly calls the scene ‘blacking up’, and while it may seem innocuous, it has other more troubling connotations. In an article in the New York Times, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a professor of English and gender studies professor at Oregon’s Linfield College, has said that in the book by PL Travers, the sequence signifies ‘racial panic’. The chimney sweep dance in Mary Poppins, led by Dick van Dyk’s affable jack-of-all-trades Burt, harks back to ‘blackface’ tropes, an academic has claimed.
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