What is it?

Mammy is a racist caricature of Black women. She is portrayed as overweight, dark-skinned, and desexualized. Mammy is shown to be happy in a position of servitude. She was a loyal worker whose world revolved around her white “family”. She is shown to be more loyal to the white family than her own. Mammy is desexualized as she goes against what was considered attractive by society in that time (dark-skinned, overweight, middle-aged). The purpose of this is that Mammy could not be perceived as a threat or competition to the woman of the household. 

The existence of a Mammy figure in real life was unlikely. Few households could afford to have house servants, and if they did, the women were usually light-skinned, thin, and young. The Mammy figure also implies that Black women were not sexually attractive to white men, but Black women and girls were often assaulted by white men, or potentially involved in consensual relationships. However, mixed race relationships were seen as taboo.