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), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. 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.

“Hottentot” is definitely a word with origins in racism, as it’s a derogatory term referencing the Khoikhoi people of South Africa used back in the 17th century. Perhaps Travers was a racist, or perhaps just a product of her time and was fond of using the slang she heard around her. The term “hottentot” eventually became a way of calling one’s behavior brutish or beastly.

But Pollack-Pelzner faces a problem here.

This word doesn’t appear anywhere in the movie. The move by Poppins to further cover her face in soot was supposed to be a funny moment where she embraced the fact that her immaculate appearance is now ruined. It was a “when in Rome” moment. This wasn’t a “shameful flirtation” with racism as Pollack-Pelzner describes.

Many people have never read the books and probably never will, but they have seen Mary Poppins and have fond memories of watching as a child. I know I do. The film brings a sense of warmth.

That’s apparently not allowed now. If anything so much as stands a little too close to something racist, then it must be spat on, including a beloved film that has no racism in it at all.

And this from the New York Times who recently released a sympathetic article about the racist hate group the Black Hebrew Israelites.