Basic Trope: A black, female, usually overweight and either middle aged or elderly, housekeeper who serves white people and may even be their slave.
- Straight: Alice is a large black woman in her fifties who works as a maid for the white Smith family.
- Exaggerated: Every black woman over 35 is a maid.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is half-black, skinny, and/or young, but otherwise fits the stereotype.
- Alice is not a slave, in fact she has a decent salary, but she's still an overweight, middle aged black woman serving a white family.
- Justified:
- The work is set before slavery was illegal.
- The work is set after slavery, but when most black women did indeed work as maids, and the reason Alice was chosen was because Mrs. Smith didn't want to hire a younger and/or prettier maid for fear of Mr. Smith cheating on her.
- The work is modern but Alice is an immigrant, and she gets a job as a housekeeper because her employer asked no questions about her citizenship.
- Inverted: Alice is a dumpy, middle-aged white woman, who works as a maid to a wealthy black family.
- Gender Inverted: Bob is a round man in his fifties who is black and works as a servant, or even slave, to the white Smith family.
- Subverted:
- Alice, a round woman of color, is seen doing the white Mr. Smith's laundry or is minding his children, but it turns out that she's Mrs. Smith.
- Alice is a large black woman who works as the maid to the offscreen Smith family, for the first few episodes, but when the Smiths are finally onscreen, it turns out that they're black too.
- Double Subverted: But despite being married to a white man, Alice Smith still serves a different white family.
- Parodied:
- Zigzagged:
- A large black woman named Alice struggles to find a job, and some of her jobs involve waiting on white families, while others don't.
- Alice starts off as a maid, but either marries a rich man or finds a job with a little more prestige.
- Averted:
- There are no maids.
- Alice the maid is white.
- Alice is a black maid, but the family she serves is also black.
- Enforced: The show takes place when black women could not find work at all except as menial domestic servants.
- Invoked: Mrs. Smith hires an older maid to avoid Mr. Smith cheating on her, and chooses a black maid because she's racist.
- Exploited:
- Defied:
- Mrs. Smith deliberately hires a maid who is not black, to avoid being Mistaken for Racist.
- Alice specifically refuses to work as a domestic servant and does what she can to avoid that fate.
- Discussed: The show takes place in the 1970's or later as more opportunities open up for black women, and while Alice works as a maid, her sister/best friend is some sort of professional and tells Alice she can do more with herself than scrubbing white people's floors.
- Conversed: "These old films are so racist! This one literally features a mammy for Christ's sake!"
- Implied:
- Deconstructed: Alice, who is living in the 1940's, serves a white family because the Smiths are the only people who offer a paying job, and even then, she makes barely enough money to get by.
- Reconstructed: Despite the Values Dissonance of the time period, Alice is respected and paid relatively-well by the white family employing her. If the show takes place in the 1960's or later, she might push her own children to pursue opportunities that weren't available to her.
- Played for Laughs:
- Played for Drama: It's a period piece about the injustices black people, especially women, have faced in history.
- Played for Horror: Even though Alice was hired because her age and/or weight would supposedly make her safe from Mr. Smith's advances, he rapes her anyway since sexual assault is not limited to conventionally-pretty women.
Back to Mammy.
