An Arkansas campaign ad has managed to outrage right-wing pundits with a single casting choice: a White man as a welfare queen.
In a commercial touting the state’s welfare-to-work requirements, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) recently rolled out “Brad” — an out-of-work gamer eating junk food and living off the government’s dime — as the policy’s poster child. MAGA commentators revolted, accusing the governor of demonizing White men. On social media, defeated Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback chastised Sanders: “I’d recommend you start with the baby-momma with a BMW who just got back from her Carnival Cruise.” Far-right influencer and podcaster Matt Walsh wrote that the real villain is “Shaniqua,” whom he called “an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.” The subtext is plain: The default face of welfare can only be a Black woman.
As critics argue about who should play the part, September’s jobs report shows that even a stagnant labor market pushes out Black women. Their unemployment rate jumped to 6.8 percent, continuing a 2025 trend in which they suffered greater job losses than any other group. Economists cite two primary causes: corporate retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion programs and drastic cuts to the federal workforce by the U.S. DOGE Service — both of which eliminated middle-class jobs disproportionately held by Black women. In today’s politics, the result is they are cast as welfare queens when they’re out of work and expendable DEI hires when they’re not.
These conflicting tropes demonstrate the role Black women have long played in far-right politics. They have served as convenient scapegoats in attempts to engineer support for partisan policy, mobilize conservative voters and placate the anxieties of White working-class voters. Whether driven by political expedience or a racist worldview, the outcome is the same: Black women are used as symbols to be deployed rather than citizens to be served.
Ronald Reagan popularized the welfare queen stereotype in his 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, and conservatives have used it ever since to justify shrinking social safety net programs and shedding regulatory burdens associated with civil rights protections. Reagan didn’t explicitly identify the race of the reportedly biracial Chicago woman who inspired it, but the implication was unmistakable. Today, President Donald Trump has pitched his anti-DEI agenda as necessary to “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.” In practice, it’s been used to stoke racial resentments and pander to receptive voters in hopes of winning elections. Though employed decades apart, both caricatures have proved effective at marshaling animus for political gain.
And they’re both inaccurate. Many of those angered by Sanders’s ad, like Walsh, were quick to point out Black women are overrepresented among welfare recipients — reason enough to leave White men out of it. But in the past 30 years, the share of Black women with college degrees has nearly tripled, from 14 percent in 1995 to 38 percent today. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies finds that Black women in the labor force are more likely to have advanced degrees than White, Black or Hispanic men. While Black women make up about 12 percent of adult women in the United States, they account for 26 percent of women serving on active duty. Compared with their share of the labor force, they are significantly overrepresented in civilian roles in the Defense Department. And they are launching small businesses more than any other group, with a growth rate almost three times that of all women-owned start-ups. Earnest believers in a color-blind meritocracy would champion these accomplishments instead of resenting the people achieving them.
While some Republicans insist that Black women remain the target of anti-welfare hostility, others in the party see the value of “Brad.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has argued for new government assistance requirements to “return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.” A spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), currently a candidate for the Senate, said the aid shouldn’t go to male gamers on the couch but to “the single mom who needs to feed her young children.”
Sanders brushed off the racial backlash, and her campaign stands by the ad. Political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock, an expert on welfare-queen politics, argues the commercial was aimed at older voters with unemployed sons, a demographic Republicans rely on. But MAGA’s anti-DEI advocates can only conceive that such ads are meant to discriminate against White men. This view directs anger at Black women rather than the work requirement — a clue that the far right is less interested in reducing fraud than in judging who deserves government support.
This double standard exposes a politics more invested in policing identity than promoting self-reliance and upward mobility. The result is that the face of a policy matters more than its aim, leading to the villainization of a group that might otherwise be a story of success. Freeing policy debates from racist stereotypes wouldn’t cast Black women as welfare queens but as exemplars of the American Dream.
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