*At the 2015 MTV/Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus and Snoop Dogg appeared together in a pre-taped segment where Miley introduced her grandmother as her ‘real mammy.’ While she was sharing the term of endearment she uses for her white grandmother, her usage of the term had serious racial implications.
Mammy is a term that is inseparable from the painful past of the Black Community – the era when enslavement was legal and protected by law.
This incident started a huge backlash on Twitter in which many including Chance the Rapper shared their disappointment. He posted a picture of actress Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind, in which she played the role of a slave housemaid and was called mammy.
The word ‘mammy’ harkens back to the stereotype of a docile Black domestic servant, usually depicted as a loud, overweight and good-natured woman. This stereotype was at its height in the days of Jim Crow and acted as propaganda of sorts about the image of the average Black woman.
This idea that it meant to perpetuate was that Black women were physically ugly, mostly ignorant and obedient to their white superiors. Basically, the mammy figure was a parody of the white perception of the average black woman.
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