The film Mary Poppins has now been reclassified as PG (parental guidance) because a character uses the word Hottentot in reference to some children with soot covered faces.
Hottentot was the name given to people living in the western cape of south Africa and is used twice by a retired captain in the film.
As you can imagine the British Tabloids are screaming WOKE but what's your opinion?
Ban Mary poppins, the films shite anyway
Typical language of the era leave it in
The worlds gone WOKE they'll be banning Hwntws next
Kids today are too dumb to know what it means anyway
I don't think we need to be revising things from the past based on today's morals, because that will never end. 20 years from now, some people will want any mention of internal combustion cars to be banned, because once you start down that road, there's nothing that someone won't claim to be offended by.
I think it's fine for a school to have a brief discussion about how standards have changed over time, and that what was once totally acceptable no longer is (we had that talk before reading Huckleberry Finn in 5th grade), but we really don't need to go beyond that except in the most extreme situations.
The Pippi Langstrumpf (Pippi Longstocking) books have worse things in them, but the ones I've read have a disclaimer at the beginning.
I seriously hope, though, that the Bugs Bunny cartoon I was thinking of just today never gets shown again. He's a cowboy, fighting off an "Indian" raid, while singing "One little, two little, ..." and marks his kills up on the wall. Bad enough. But the joke is, he rubs half of one of the marks off because "that one was a half-breed".
No kid today is going to know what a "Hottentot" is.
When Mary Poppins came out, I was the only kid in my class, I think (and I'm certain, the only boy), who didn't see it.(I was worried about whether Willie Mays would hit.400)
"Hottentot" is an offensive description of the Indigenous People of South Africa's Western cape. I would explain to my children in age-appropriate manner that the word is basically a racial slur and its use should be avoided.
I agree with how you'd handle it, but I also think that it wasn't intended as a racial slur in the film at the time.
Sambo, a children's book from 1899, was a pleasant story about an indian boy trying not to get eaten, but it was used as a racist slur by, frankly, assholes.
The film was made years ago and nobody was offended by it then. People have to put on their big boy pants and stop being so offended by the littlest things.
Don't be silly. Taking the word Hottentot for an offense means nearly every word can be taken as an offense, which for sure may be possible depending on circumstances and context... ;0)
If nobody never said anything about it we would not even be having this conversation. I wonder how many more people have boycotted Disney because of this latest assault on our intelligence?
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