“Don’t touch me, you black heathen”

The film Mary Poppins is racist according to a US academic writing in the New York Times, who accuses Dame Julie Andrews of 'blacking up' with soot while dancing with chimney sweeps.

Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner criticises the moment when Mary Poppins joins Dick Van Dyke's Bert to dance on a rooftop for the song Step in Time.

He writes: 

"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."
"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)."

"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”.
"We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans; they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. It’s a parody of black menace; it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy."