Do These Jeans Make My Ad Look Racist?

 

John McWhorter

Opinion

Do These Jeans Make My Ad Look Racist?

 

July 29, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/opinion/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ad.html

John McWhorter

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

 

Have you heard the rumor that the clothing company American Eagle is using racist propaganda to sell clothing? That’s the allegation that bubbled up on social media in response to the company’s new ad campaign featuring the actress Sydney Sweeney and a pun.

 

Sweeney, best known for her roles on the television shows “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” and the film “Anyone but You,” has been featured in advertising campaigns for products ranging from expensive Korean cosmetics to Baskin-Robbins ice cream, but it’s the American Eagle ads that really caught some people’s eye. In one spot, the camera slowly pans over her supine body as she zips up her fly and explains, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring.” Turning to the camera, she adds, “My jeans are blue.” In another ad, she walks up to a billboard that says, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.” A moment later, the last word has been crossed out and replaced with “jeans.”

 

The message of the ads seems to be that Sweeney has good genes because she’s attractive. Beneath that, perhaps, is the hint that people can get a bit of her good fortune by buying her jeans. But a number of observers heard something more upsetting: A young, attractive, blond woman talking about genes — especially “great” ones — and offspring sounded to them like a dog whistle about eugenics.

 

One social media post called it “genuinely scary.” Another opined: “The American Eagles ad wasn’t just a commercial. It was a love letter to white nationalism and eugenic fantasies, and Sydney Sweeney knew it.”

 

“Praising Sydney Sweeney for her great genes in the context of her white, blond hair blue eye appearance,” a commentator said on TikTok. “It is one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we’ve seen and heard in a while. When those traits are consistently uplifted as genetic excellence, we know where this leads. This just echoes pseudoscientific language of racial superiority.”

 

As for good (or great) genes, Robin Landa, an expert on advertising and branding, told Newsweek that the expression “was once central to American eugenics ideology, which promoted white genetic superiority and enabled the forced sterilization of marginalized groups.”

 

The whole thing made me wonder — as I have on many other occasions — what the statute of limitations should be on historically tarnished terms. Are some terms really off limits forever because of what they meant to people long ago?

 

The word “spook,” for instance, once used as an anti-Black slur, is these days more commonly associated with ghosts and goblins. Last year at Harper College, in Palatine, Ill., a flier for a Halloween event included the word “spooktac-Q-lar.” A campus editorialist objected, arguing that such words “should be retired, not because we seek to erase history, but because we are committed to creating a future where everyone feels respected and heard.” An increasing number of people have made similar suggestions.

 

I doubt a vast majority of Black Americans would see this kind of ceremonial politesse as necessary or even relevant. Experiences will differ, but I, for one, close to 60 years old, have never heard the word used in that context, even in jest.

 

A similar problem has arisen with “tar baby,” an expression that had an early life as an anti-Black slur but today more typically means something you get a hold of but then can’t let go. In 2011, Representative Doug Lamborn warned that if debt ceiling negotiations failed, voters would “hold the president responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby, and you get it, you’re stuck and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”

 

Not Lamborn’s best day: Because the president in question — Barack Obama — is Black, it sounded as though Lamborn was using the term to denigrate him. Lamborn apologized, but the journalist David Sirota wrote that the gaffe showed “how various forms of racism are still being mainstreamed by the fringe right.”

 

Was that really what was going on — as opposed to just a clumsy turn of phrase? If so, how to explain the equally self-righteous harrumphing when Mitt Romney used the phrase while discussing a highway project; a White House spokesman, Tony Snow, used it in reference to telephone surveillance, and John McCain mentioned it while talking about divorce procedures.

 

A desire for respectful discourse does not outweigh the obvious fact that a word or expression can have two meanings, one of them widely understood and one of them antique and little known. Romney and Snow indicated that they didn’t know “tar baby” could be used as a slur; McCain and Lamborn emphasized in their apologies that they were not intending to use it that way. On this one as well, I, at least, was unaware until I encountered the blowback.

 

Are we Black Americans really so delicate that we (or our fellow travelers) should demand that America be ever on lexical tiptoes, shielding us from supposed reminders of a grievous past?

 

On the television series “The Gilded Age,” Gladys is a young heiress married against her will to an English duke. Spirited off to his dreary estate and cringing under the withering smirks of her sister-in-law, she moans, “There are so many rules!”

 

American linguistic culture can feel like that these days. People from both left and right tell us what we are not allowed to say, for reasons that feel more performative than urgent. We grapple with a willfully tricky and ever-accreting volume of etiquette.

 

In many cultures around the world, speaking the name of deceased ancestors is taboo; in some cultures, that extends even to words that merely sound like their names. I doubt this is where we want to go.

 

Language changes; culture changes; labels are reassigned. And a blond, blue-eyed actress talking about jeans — or even genes — is just a pun, not a secret salute to white supremacy.

 

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter