this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Is the chimney sweep routine really blackface, or is it just classist humor at the expense of impoverished white people who had the shittiest job outside of coal mining?
The original novel had a racist element to the chimney sweeps. The film departs from that, but its source material is about as racist for what you would expect of a novel from that time period. There was some minor controversy where some English professor accused the film of racism: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mary-poppins-racist/
That said, I refuse to ever say anything that might be construed as defending racism in any form, and suggesting that a work of art exists as a cultural artifact of often contested ideological beliefs of the time and place it was created, possessing creative merits independent of its source material or even particular one-off attributes that may have aged poorly when viewed in the light of contemporary discourse, comes dangerously close to outright apologia in the eyes of your more insufferable pearl clutchers on the internet.
So, yeah, Mary Poppins is definitely racist. Why? Well, it's not my job to educate you, that's why.
Do you realize the whole second paragraph of your comment is one sentence…
(the extra . are in case you need them)
I take it you're not a José Saramago fan?
Hard to be a fan of someone you’ve never heard of. Did he invent the run on sentence?
No, but he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and his writing style emphasizes famously long sentences, some of them stretching for pages.
So he popularized the run on sentence, got it.
Eh, you'll probably like him once you read him. They teach his books a lot in high school English, so you'll maybe get some exposure in...I'm gonna guess 5 years or so.
Passive aggressiveness, nice!
I won’t be reading his works, mostly because I prefer authors that use proper English grammar.
Buck up kiddo, you’ll get ‘em next time!
That's not passive aggressiveness; it's condescension. Passive aggressiveness would be like hiding a spouse's favorite condiments after an argument or intentionally being late to a meeting with someone you don't like. It's being indirectly mean or hurtful. I'm very direct, by comparison.
A truly fascinating hill to die on. I'm gonna bet you're a BIG Brandon Sanderson and J. K. Rowling fan. Maybe a little Stephen King if you want to be adventurous.
I mean, it’s really not. It’s just a preference. I’m not at all familiar with Brandon Sanderson. I’ve never read J. K. Rowling but am familiar due to pop culture. I read some Stephen King years ago. Don’t remember what all besides The Stand and The Dark Tower.
Given your concern over my reading habits, you must be a librarian?