WASHINGTON -- At this years MTV Video Music Awards, host Miley Cyrus appeared in a pre-taped segment with hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg and her own grandmother. Snoop told Cyrus that her mammie -- which has evidently long been Cyrus' affectionate nickname for her grandma -- had made the marijuana brownies they were eating.

When the segment was over and the broadcast returned to Cyrus live onstage at the VMAs, she introduced Snoop as -- and we'll give her the benefit of the doubt with the spelling, here -- her real mammie . To many people , it sounded like Cyrus was calling Snoop her "mammy" -- a term that's inseparably bound up with the painful history of African enslavement.

The remark prompted an immediate Twitter backlash , most prominently from the Chicago emcee Chance the Rapper, who posted a photo of Hattie McDaniel in "Gone with the Wind." In that film, McDaniel played a character, literally named Mammy, who was Scarlett OHaras house slave and personal servant.