Arkansas campaign ad sparks conservative backlash for portraying lazy welfare recipient as white

(AP) — 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,…

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.”Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist website, wrote that “our government has systematically discriminated against white men for decades now, and yet now has the audacity to dishonestly mock young white men as welfare queens.”Never mind that the video was about Medicaid and not welfare, or that most Medicaid recipients in Arkansas are white. The outrage was a reminder of how old tropes are “chronically accessible” images in some voters’ minds, said Ange-Marie Hancock, author of “The Politics of Disgust and the Public Identity of the ‘Welfare Queen.’”She thinks the Arkansas video was supposed to appeal to older voters living with unemployed adult children.

But conservatives could only focus on race, Hancock said, because the idea of a Black welfare abuser has worked for them for decades.“The longer race and gendered history really points to ideas that African Americans are lazy, they don’t do the right thing,” she said.The debate that streaked across social media was the latest example of how conservatives have recently wrestled with racist views. Last month, a Texas political candidate named Bo French posted a picture of nonwhite students cheering at a University of Texas football game, saying “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Some Republicans denounced French's post, while it was embraced by those who fear the country's changing demographics.Sanders, who is running for reelection this year, “stands by the ad,” said Jordan Powell, her campaign manager.“We should never confiscate mon…