CAAM’s ‘Mammy’ exhibit dispels racist stereotype

Walking into “Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840-1940,” the viewer is first confronted with a bright red polka-dotted head wrap in the middle of a dark, low-lit room — a piece of clothing associated with the historical representation of a “mammy.”

With that piece and others, the California African American Museum’s exhibit showcases artwork representing how modern-day stereotypes of Black women came to develop in the United States. 

When discussing the conception of the exhibit, assistant curator Taylor Blythewood-Porter said that she and previous Curator of History Tyree Boyd-Pates were going through CAAM’s main collection and noticed a lot of racist memorabilia, which sparked a conversation over why the items were created, who they serve and who they hurt. 

“We were able to organize and put [the art] into different categories, such as film, dolls, domestic items, and from there we were really able to see how stereotypes and their power are really being disseminated through various different types of marketing and entertainment,” Blythewood-Porter said of the curation process.

The exhibit focuses on the mammy stereotype, which is a caricature of an older Black woman who is overweight, sassy, typically dark-skinned, desexualized and entrenched in supposedly-pleasant servitude to white families, according to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. It’s a stereotype that has historically limited society’s conceptions of a Black woman’s capabilities and depth. She takes care of another’s family, keeps its children in line and finds fulfillment in her work.

Other pieces included photos, posters, kitchen supplies and books. Perhaps the most compelling part of the exhibit, the film portion included excerpts from movie “Gone with the Wind,” a racist children’s cartoon called “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,” a minstrel short and the 1915 version of the pro-Ku Klux Klan movie “The Birth of a Nation.” Each exhibited different, often false, representations of the Black experience, with an emphasis on womanhood. 

The exhibit is somewhat limited to a relatively small, dark room with many physical pieces, but not to its detriment — Bythewood-Porter and Boyd-Pates chose the artwork carefully and effectively. The breadth of mediums represented amplifies the separate pieces, as each is impactful in its uniqueness and rarity. 

One such piece is an original copy of a program from the White House’s first screening of the “The Birth of a Nation,” which was largely perceived as a governmental endorsement of white supremacy, according to the History Channel. Because of this isolation, the intimate space clearly illuminates the issue of Black people’s portrayal in the media throughout history, as well as how these portrayals still permeate popular culture today. 

Naomi Neal, a visitor experience associate at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, praised the exhibit’s ability to make its audience realize how normalized these stereotypes have become in society.

“I’ve seen [mammy portrayals] a lot within the studies in the field that I work in, but for a lot of people it may not be as simple as seeing it until you’re in an exhibition where it’s completely dedicated to a mammy, and then some people, it may dawn on them like, ‘Oh, that was a mammy portrayal,’” Neal said, also referencing modern movies with evolved portrayals of the mammy figure such as “The Help” and “Hidden Figures.”

According to Blythewood-Porter, the mammy figure did not actually exist during slavery: She would not have been overweight, as many slaves were malnourished; she would not have been dark-skinned if she were working inside of the home; and she would have not been older, as usually younger women took care of white children. 

This manipulation of history served two main purposes. The first was that Southern white women felt more comfortable with having an older, non-sexualized servant in their home to assuage their anxieties of their husbands being unfaithful — fears that developed from the long history of sexual abuse between white male enslavers and enslaved young Black women.

The second purpose for the creation of the amiable mammy is the American South’s effort to keep pro-slavery sentiments alive.

“After the Civil War, it was like the Southerners’ kind of push for good PR, like, ‘Oh, slavery wasn’t all that bad,” Blythe-Porter said. “Look, mammy’s with us, she stayed. She stayed with the family. She stayed with the home,’”

Although such falsehoods served white oppressors, they were the breeding grounds for one-dimensional stereotypes of Black women seen today, she added. 

Saidi Foster, a father attending CAAM with his son, appreciated how the exhibit brought awareness of these stereotypes’ origins, as these portrayals were a white-dominated populace’s only understanding of the Black experience.

“I think it’s important, Foster said. “I think it helps bring an awareness of … how people thought of African Americans — how they saw them and how they were portrayed in the media back then.”

Neal’s mother, Sileia Neal, appreciated the exhibit for challenging the media’s distorted and dehumanizing representations of minority characters. She spoke from her own growth as a Latinx woman who was once unfamiliar with Black culture, as many Latin American cultures she’s familiar with have track records of erasing their Black history. Through familial connections, she made active efforts to learn about this history, which opened her eyes to the many ways in which Black people are discriminated against and fundamentally misunderstood. 

“That’s a student, that’s a young man, that’s a woman, that’s somebody’s child … that could be the next scientist,” Neal said.

Blythewood-Porter shared the same sentiment and said the exhibit asks visitors to reflect on the Black women they know who are individually successful, such as doctors and lawyers, and how we can redefine our broad understanding of the spectrum of women’s work.

Ultimately, she said, the exhibit is about reclaiming what it means to be a Black woman in the United States: taking ownership over a detrimental historical narrative and forming a widespread sense of self-esteem to empower and redefine future generations.

“There’s been a lack of self-love and worthiness [among Black women],” Blythewood-Porter said. “And I think that with this exhibition, it’s being able to take more agency and ownership over that.”