So you’d consider marrying a “mammy”?
If I were considering a wife she would definitely make the short list. 
No, but since the Mammies you see the most of these days aren’t dimwitted you are setting up a straw…um…woman. The Mammy of yore–long, long ago–may have been dimwitted but by the middle of the 20th century they were already evolving into Big Mamas. Look at Mammy in GWTW. She is the only person we meet whom Rhett Butler respects because she’s the smart one! And the eponymous Beulah was not the dumb one on that show–Hattie McDaniel (both Mammy and Beulah) made a career, with the help of her trouble-making directors, out of forcing up the image of black women in films. Obese? Well, I can’t very much hold THAT against anyone. Sexless? Brother, you get to a certain age… But didn’t somebody else describe how slave women were the sex toys of their owners? Hmmm, maybe getting that fat was the only thing that turned the old goat off. Finally, how do we know she’s neglecting her own children? The Mammies of fairly modern (since 1935, conveniently missing 1934’s Imitation of Life because it was too creepy for words) fiction are all older with grown children if they have any at all. They are neglecting no one.
Mammy is a fiction based, loosely, on real women. Thanks to pioneers like McDaniel the image of black women in film, radio, and TV the image of black women improved faster than that of men. At least give Mammy credit for being a positive, for the most part, image when the usual black people of popular entertainment were buffoons.
That’s it??!! You noticed that Aunt Jemima products now use an African-American woman who looks like a middle manager and decided that we needed to resurrect discounted racist images to get torqued-off about?
Man, this is such a non-issue.
I don’t want her resurected. As you can see, there are enough people she has offended to keep her dead and buried, though the Big Mama stereotype ain’t all that far off. I just miss the old bird and feel she has been unjustly stigmatized.
And please, as I have mentioned before I am FAR too over-medicated to get “torqued off” by much of anything. 
Since this thread was written in 2004, and it is now 2013, much has happened recently, and has influenced how I look at this topic.
Granted, I grew up in the era when it was required of us students to read “Gone with the Wind.” I actually loved the book and the movie. However, this does not mean that I am suggesting that I endorse the Mammy stereotype.
America had slavery, and the stereotypes of nurturing older black women who were actually the nannies, cooks, etc., and these types of characters, endured in our culture. Recently, Paula Deen, a celebrity chef on the Food Network admitted to the use of the n word, which she had used 30 years previously, in private, to her husband after a black man had held a gun to her face in a bank robbery.
I grew up in California, which was an entirely different atmosphere than Georgia in the 50’s and 60’s. I knew not to use that offensive word, but I feel there are people that would like to rewrite history, and in this case, hold Paula Deen accountable for racism in America, especially towards black people.
In my opinion, the south was a different world than the west coast. Just as Paula grew up with a great grandfather that had been a plantation owner in the south, and had had slaves, my ancestors were from Washington and Oregon. I do not say that using the n word could ever be acceptable, but the west was not as racist as the south. It never was and never will be.
Still, when Al Jolson sang Mammy, with his blackface on, apparently he was very kind to black musicians and helped mainstream jazz into our society. Even if blackface is atrocious to black people today, which I can understand, it is a part of our actual history. There were many wonderful women, who dressed like Mammy and were beautiful souls, even if in actuality they were slaves. We may not endorse the treatment of these human beings as slaves, but it is just a matter of history.
You may read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and be horrified that Jewish people in Holocaust Germany were killed by the millions. And this is one of the largest, if not the very largest atrocities in history. We cannot rewrite history and take away the Holocaust, just as we cannot rewrite history and remove all traces of slavery from the past and racism towards black people, in the United States.
Just as Anne Frank told her poignant story, that makes us weep with the injustice of this beautiful young girl losing the hopes and dreams of her future, we also see what a talented and insiteful writer she was. Without her book we would not have had as much understanding of the dehumanization and terrorizing treatment of Jewish people during WWII.
Instead of rewriting or resenting history, we need to understand how these events could have happened and make sure that they never happen again.
I am sure, now that Paula Deen was truthful in a deposition that she had uttered the n word, and lost millions of dollars in endorsements as a result, as well as her Food Network show, she has a deeper understanding of the horrendous harm and hurt that this word evokes in black Americans today. And her poor choice in accepting and using this word, has forever changed her understanding of the deep-rooted stereotypes that exist towards black people.
We are all products of our environment. If our parents teach us tolerance and that we should not call other people harmful names, that is good, and this is all we know. I would imagine though, that in the 60’s many white people in the south used this despicable name. This is unfortunate, but let’s face it; Americans fought and killed one another in the Civil War, over this topic of the right to have slaves or the fact that slavery had to be abolished since it was evil.
I cannot say that I would have acted any different than Paula Deen had I been a product of her environment. She did not create slavery, racial injustice, stereotypes of Mammy or Aunt Jemima, plantations in the south, blackface, or any of these things that most black people most likely wish had not happened. But, just as a young girl named Anne Frank wrote a diary describing the terror imposed on Jewish people in WWII Germany, and was a shining jewel that will always exist in history, so too, with the writing of “Gone with the Wind,” we will forever be reminded that some people had all their freedom stripped from them, and yet, somehow they remained loving and nurturing, in spite of this horrendous injustice.
Basically, as human beings, hopefully we strive to learn from any mistakes that we have made currently, or that our ancestors have made in the past. The more that all races learn to accept one another and respect one another, the better off we will be as Americans. But, good and bad, history traces our actions as Americans. Injustice of all sorts needs to be fought against. We can only strive to do better now and in the future.
I had a German nanny in Germany. Back in the US, I had the same German nanny that my grandmother brought back in 1923 to take care of my father and his 2 brothers. When they were grown up, she was my Grandmothers maid of all work and cook. As various cousins popped out, Marie went to take care of them - each of my grandparents 3 sons had Marie take care of their kids for 8-10 years per family [we are sort of spread in age, my Uncle Bill’s kids came first, in the 50s and we were in the late 60s and my Uncle John’s kids were 70s babies.] Then she went back and cared for my Grandmother until she died, then Marie lived with my parents [not as a maid because she was now in her 80s] until she died. She is buried in the family plot.
My roommate, grandaughter of Charles McNary was raised by her Grandmother in the 50s and 60s and they did have a black driver, married to the black maid who helped raise my roommate - who called her Auntie and the gentleman Uncle. It was a term of respect given to the very cultured black men and women who in that particular social circle worked for white families. Frequently their families had been slaves then freedmen working for the same family for over a hundred years.
And my first thought is tignon - hair covering. Women doing housework white or black [or yellow or brown just so the Chinese and Mexicans can get in on the discussion] back in the day covered their hair - cleaning was frequently a dusty cobwebby task, and if you did not take a full bath and wash your hair until the weekend, you did not want to get it dirty.
See above - in louisiana the tignon was worn as a stumtuary law differencing between black/mulatto/octaroons and white women. Women back in the day covered their hair when cleaning or really any sort of housework. Women also tended to cover their heads when outside the house - a hangover from the middle ages and renaissance.
And I have a whole passel of nonrelatives that I grew up calling Aunt or Uncle that were never slaves or servants - it used to be a term of respect to call an older person that if they were very good family friends. Hell, ask our Indian board members about Aunti-ji and Uncle-ji …
I don’t want to wade into this too much but the “slaves” he’s pointing to were interviewed over 70 years after the end of slavery, had with rare exceptions been slaves only as children and had their experiences colored by reconstruction.
I suspect that if you talked to 40 year old ex-slaves in 1870, there would have been different reactions.
Moreover, I’m not sure how typical the ones he quoted were.
It just needs updating.
From “I don’t know nothing about birthin no babies” to “let me tell you how to live.”
In Prissy’s defense, I understand that, in the book, she was a fine lady’s maid from New Orleans and, therefore, not only knew nothing about birthing babies but was also determined to keep it that way. Her job, before the downfall of Tara, was to know how to iron pleats, fix hair, and teach Miss Scarlett some French. That is what a lady’s maid, free or enslaved, did for centuries. Delivering, raising, or even looking at children was not in her contract as she saw it. In reality, following Emancipation she would have taken the first train back to New Orleans or up to New York, where there were people who could appreciate, and afford, her valuable skills.
JanetMLS, welcome to the SDMB! However, I disagree about forgiving Paula Deen her several peccadillos (it wasn’t just that she said “nigger” once 30 years ago). I am not from the South originally, but I grew up in Virginia just a few years later than Paula grew up wherever it was where she grew up. I knew men and women of her parents’ generation, and while they could say some nasty and thoughtless things, they are all long dead. The country has done a lot of growing up in the past fifty years, but some of what she has said and done shows that she’s several decades behind where a woman her age should be. And her recipes are disgusting; I know because I ate some of that crap in the early '60s. Boiled dressing? GAAAAK! Now, a sweet vinaigrette with bacon bits, using some of the bacon fat instead of oil, heated and poured over lettuce to wilt the leaves, is some mighty fine eating, but the recipe I saw had a cup and a half of flour in it! It was not fit to slop hogs.