‘New York Times’ Takes On ‘Blackface’ In ‘Mary Poppins’

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.'”