A new video from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was standard issue Republican messaging for promoting her state’s stricter rules for people on Medicaid. No more could able-bodied people lounge around while receiving taxpayer-funded healthcare, she said — they needed to work.
But the decision to portray an unemployed moocher as a young, white, cheeseball-chomping gamer named Brad upset some conservative commentators last week. Five decades after Ronald Reagan popularized the “welfare queen” trope about people living luxuriously while not working, they wanted to know why the video wasn’t featuring a Black woman instead.
“Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain,” posted Matt Walsh, a conservative writer. “Even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.”
Black women have been instrumental in so many human and civil rights movements. They bring our society forward and out of patriarchy’s evil grasp. That’s why these racist white fucks want to portray a “welfare queen” that is black.
Right, because no one who is white has ever collected welfare!
🤣
I grew up in an extremely red area. Also very rural. I can tell you that welfare is mostly what held the fabric of things together, barely. It was virtually 100% white, too.
And yet, those fuckers were still voting Republican and bitching about “those people” in the cities “on welfare”.
My wife used to work as an optician, and she said that almost every client from a nearby rural town was on Medicare or Medicaid.
From the Wikipedia page on the town discussing the census results: The race distribution is as follows: 554 White, 0 African American, 0 Asian, 8 American Indian and Alaska Native, 0 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, 34 Other, and 12 who identified by two or more races.
I moved from Arkansas in 2021. I lived there for 18 years. A vast majority of welfare and EBT/SNAP recipients there are white - most of whom are also on drugs; such as meth. Just Arkansans unable to face reality on yet another topic of daily life there among many.
Edit: Just wanted to throw this out there, my source for this info is my mother who worked for Arkansas HHS for 20 years.
I also moved out of Arkansas in 2021. I had lived there almost my entire life.
My hometown and the surrounding areas are almost entirely white. So it makes sense that the majority of welfare recipients are white. Hell, I was dirt poor growing up and we got assistance. I specifically remember WIC and food stamps.
I have family who know that we were on welfare who would still reference “welfare queens” because they’re conservative and it goes without saying, also racist.
