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Ross Douthat and the "Welfare Duchess"

By Ethan Brown

Roy Edroso has a handy little guide to brand new NYT columnist Ross Douthat's stranger scribblings.

But in my neck of the woods--New Orleans--Douthat will be remembered for coining the phrase "Welfare Duchess" to describe a New Orleans woman named Sharon Jasper who was living in subsidized housing and who happened to be photographed in her apartment with a big screen TV.

A few commenters nailed Douthat for the stupid, and frankly racist, remark. "Here's the double-bind," wrote one commenter, "If Sharon Jasper keeps her apartment clean and attractive and decorates it with flowers she's a crooked welfare queen, cynically scamming the Hell out of the sweaty, put-upon, hard workin', tax payin', David Duke votin' white Louisianans. Conversely if she'd let it degenerate into a filthy mess, she'd be a typical slum-dwelling black: a sub-human savage who doesn't even deserve to live indoors." [More...]

But the best response to the outrage over Jasper's alleged good fortune came from New Orleans blogger Dangerblond who captured the absurdity with this great satirical headline:"elderly black woman caught with big-screen t.v.; lacks proper level of humility and appreciation."

In the era of bailouts for billionaires and socialism for the rich, of course, Douthat's skewering of an African American woman for having a living standard too high for his tastes seems all the more misguided. In fact, I'd like to see the phrase "Welfare Queen" or if Douthat prefers, "Welfare Duchess," applied to the likes of Citigroup or Bank of America.

As Cactus at Angry Bear wrote last fall:"..Can we at least require every bank that takes government money to include the words 'Welfare Queen' in its name? I think it would be a very useful thing if Goldman Sachs were forced to call itself Welfare Queen Goldman Sachs. It might make a few members of the voting public realize exactly how the system work."

Here's hoping that at his new perch Douthat will apply the same level of scrutiny to the big banks as he did to a low-income resident of a city that has rebuilt and largely repopulated without the sort of helping hand extended to, as Cactus might put it, Welfare Queen Goldman Sachs.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 12, 2009 (boomark / email).