Euphemisms are, by their nature, tricky things. They are designed to simultaneously suggest ugly topics and avoid them. They allow interested parties to talk about sensitive issues in code, while at the same time maintaining a plausible deniability concerning the subject matter and their overall goals. They are contextual, insinuating through proximity what they do not dare to claim outright. The use of euphemism is a good way for those of a delicate nature to hurt people, because euphemisms allow for an injured retreat under challenge, with claims of pure intentions and unfortunate misunderstandings.
Euphemism is the antithesis of careful and interesting analysis, in the way that it replaces clarity with innuendo, daring with the provision of a safe retreat.
On April 15, Bowdoin saw a striking deployment of euphemism on campus, in the context of chalk-drawn slogans against taxation and the current presidential administration's financial policies. A variety of these messages appeared on sidewalks around campus, but one in particular invites further examination: "Dethrone the welfare queens," written in bold yellow chalk letters on the sidewalk just west of Adams Hall.
The euphemism "welfare queen" has a long and dishonorable history in American politics. The concept has been around since at least the 1960s, but was popularized by Ronald Reagan's exaggerated description during his 1976 election campaign of a Chicago woman cheating the welfare system. It has been a racialized image since that time. Over the next 20 years, the idea of the "welfare queen"—if not always the term itself—remained as a central element in conservative efforts to deploy racial animosity as a political strategy in the United States. "Welfare queens" were poor, urban, improvident, undeserving of aid, and above all, African-American; they lived off the hard work of deserving, middle-class white folks.
The stereotype of the "welfare queen" was probably surpassed in popularity among conservatives only by the much older and even more pervasive American stereotype of the threatening, violent black man, used, for example, in George H.W. Bush's "Willie Horton" attacks during the 1988 election campaign. Over a period when the universal nature of civil rights has become more widely accepted in the United States, naked appeals to racism have become less and less useful in American politics. Under those circumstances, euphemisms like "welfare queen" became especially handy, insinuating the old themes of race to those animated by them, while maintaining some plausible deniability for politicians who made use of them.
After its role in the 1976 Republican primaries, the concept of the "welfare queen" became important again in the mid-1990s, during debates over the role of welfare programs in American society. These debates culminated in the 1997 abolition of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) federal assistance program, which restricted or removed many of the support mechanisms used by people on welfare. In principle, Bill Clinton's 1993 promise to "end welfare as we know it," and the subsequent end to AFDC, would imply the end of the idea of the "welfare queen"—but a negative stereotype for poor, urban black women was simply too useful for some conservatives to set aside and forget about. It has cropped up periodically in American politics since that time, in different forms and with different values.
And thus we come to Bowdoin, and mid-April in 2009. In a political and economic season when poor people are not in fact primary targets of conservative animosity, "Dethrone the welfare queens" appears in big, bright letters on the sidewalk directly below the offices of Bowdoin's Africana Studies Program, in Adams Hall. As we have noted, in euphemism, proximity and innuendo are everything.
There's no direct or obvious connection between a race- and class-loaded term like "welfare queen" and the themes of the "Tea Parties" being organized around the country, but at this point there hardly has to be. "Welfare queen" and the different kinds of animosity it represents have become a conservative reflex, deployed in this case only for their juvenile shock value and their ability to hurt people. Euphemism has hardened into cant, and cant, especially, has no place at a school like Bowdoin.
Where do we go from here? We are very happy to see dialogue, debate, and even protest at Bowdoin—but when such activities are juvenile and unthinking, they need to be identified as such. At the least, we would like to encourage creativity in protest on campus. Our students are generally smart and inventive people: Bowdoin students should be able to come up with their own causes and ideas, without having to borrow ugly and obsolete slogans from a generation before theirs.
Scott MacEachern is a professor of anthropology. The following members of the faculty and staff, all working in Adams Hall, would like to be noted as co-signers of this op-ed: Rosemary Armstrong, Pamela Ballinger, Joe Bandy, Susan Bell, Jan Brunson, Gabrielle Foreman, Eileen Johnson, Matt Klingle, Seth Ovadia, Roy Partridge, Jill Pearlman, Krista Van Vleet, and Olufemi Vaughan.