Decolonizing Mammy

Warning: In this analysis of the Tate Taylor film Ma starring Octavia Spencer, the post contains spoilers.

This September, Harlem rapper Azealia Banks took to Instagram to disparage plus-size singer Lizzo shortly after her single Truth Hurts hit number one on the Billboard charts.

"Lmao the fact that the public and the media has been keeping this fat girl joke going for so long is honestly peak boredom . . . . . . Saddest bit is that the girl is legit talented and truly only being allowed to shine so long as she allows herself to be this millennial mammy of sorts."
- Azealia Banks targets Lizzo with Instagram comment tirade, Fader Sept 4, 2019

While Lizzo does not come to the stage with a kerchief on her head and a white baby on her hip, Banks takes offense at the ways she believes white America is both amused and comforted by what she sees as the buffoonish antics of an overweight black woman.

Lizzo flaunts her sexuality unabashedly; if anything she makes a spectacle of the voluptuous black body as excess in order to rework stereotypes of larger black women dislodging big black women from the stereotype of “mammy” specifically. Given that scantily clad women in the media are abundant and that twerking has evolved into a national pastime, one must question Banks’s decision to bequeath the moniker of “millennial mammy” to Lizzo rather than simply castigate her for giving in to industry expectations that female performers be hypersexual.

For Banks to label Lizzo “mammy,” a figure considered asexual and one that is often characterized as an overweight black woman, demonstrates Banks’s discomfort with larger black women’s bodies, her insistence that fat black women performers conform to a more rigid politics of respectability than their slimmer counterparts, but more importantly it demonstrates an inability to see fat black female bodies as able to exist outside of the iconography of mammy.

The deconstruction of stereotyped representations of blacks in the media by scholars such as Donald Bogle and Patricia Hill Collins has been crucial in understanding the ways these stereotypes reinforce white supremacy. However, the canonization of a small set of black stereotypes sometimes stifles alternative or nuanced analyses of contemporary representations of blacks in mainstream media, particularly with regards to black women.

I am interested in developing a wider visual vocabulary for interpreting representations of fat black women. To that aim, I offer an analysis of Octavia Spencer’s presence in Tate Taylor’s 2019 movie Ma that seeks to decolonize Mammy.

Ma takes place in the suburbs of Ohio and centers on the lonely life of a black middle-aged woman, Sue Ann, who works as a rather ineffective veterinarian assistant at the town clinic. Things pick up for Sue Ann once she befriends a group of predominately white teens after agreeing to buy them alcohol and subsequently allowing them to party in her basement. It is important to note that Scott Landes scripted the part of Sue Ann to be played by a white actress. Perhaps as redress for casting Spencer as a maid in The Help (2011), Taylor revised the script for Spencer to assuage her reported concerns regarding the limited roles for black women in Hollywood. So in many ways what I read as the subversive potential of Ma is a fluke of colorblind casting. Yet despite the film’s underlying mission to veer away from the mammy trope and even Spencer’s own thirty-pound weight loss prior to filming, many reviewers were unable to disassociate Spencer’s portrayal from the stereotype. For example, Armond White characterizes the film as a “bizarre sequel to Precious” and labels Spencer a “post-Obama Mammy,” while C. C. Saunders calls her a “nuanced mammy figure.”

Provocatively, reviewer Ellen June points out “‘Ma’s’ short for ‘Mammy,’ isn’t it?” However, in the movie, the term “Ma” is bandied out as a flirtatious nickname (perhaps a derivative of “Mami”) indicating Sue Ann’s desirability and her newly found insider status among the group of popular, predominately white high schoolers. If Mammy is characterized by her nurturing of white children, Sue Ann emerges as quite the opposite. Sue Ann is the proverbial “fun mom”, sans children, who wants to appear cool and who relives her youth through inappropriately interacting with teenagers. She devolves from cliché to would-be serial killer when being summarily rejected by the group triggers memories of earlier experiences as an outsider in high school, subsequently sexually assaulted by proxy when her white-boy crush tricks her into performing fellatio on another white male teenager from school.

As a black woman who was raised in a white suburb, upon watching Ma, I was struck by the fact that I have never seen a filmic representation of the trauma many blacks (particularly women) carry as a result of growing up in predominately white suburban environs. Ma offers viewers a new archetype of black womanhood – the black female suburbanite. Unlike earlier representations of middle-class black women that can be readily subsumed under the archetype of the “black lady,” instead of respectability politics being its primary thematic, this representation of black womanhood is underscored by the intersectional trauma black girls and women face in predominately white suburban settings that typically center around the politics of beauty, desirability, and popularity.

Because Sue Ann’s isolation resonated with me, I was initially tempted to read the film’s black suburbanite revenge fantasy plot as subversive. And yet, despite Spence’s prominence in the film, its subversive potential is thwarted because the white mainstream remains the film’s intended audience. Throughout my childhood and the bulk of my formative years, I have watched Freddy Krueger, Jason, and Michael Myers reign as lovable slashers, and yet Sue Ann is not worthy of a franchise. Her modest spree of maiming and killing will remain an aberration for fear of what it means to make her example, the norm.

Maggie (Diana Silvers), the film’s true protagonist, saves the townspeople and Sue Ann’s own daughter from the monstrous black woman. In one fell swoop with Sue Ann’s death, the black audience is denied any real catharsis. Her consequences mimic real-life consequences one would expect to ensue after her actions. The possibility of white empathy is abated and white guilt is assuaged. Maggie’s final words to Sue Ann as she pushes her into the fire are that she “is not [her] parents.”

Ma, therefore, is ultimately a post-racial lament about whether white children should be held accountable for the racism perpetrated by their parents. One could very well extend this logic to whether or not contemporary whites should be held accountable for slavery and recent discussions about reparations. So, while I maintain that “mammy” is not the correct characterization of Spencer’s portrayal of Sue Ann, I wholeheartedly agree with Max J. Gordon when he calls Ma “The Help, Part 2.”

Ma demonstrates the consequences of refusing to be Mammy, of refusing to put your own desires as a black woman before that of whites.

Kimberly Nichele Brown, Ph.D. is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. Her first book is titled, Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Black Women's Subjectivity (Indiana University Press, 2010). She is currently working on a book on ethical black feminist spectatorship.