The White History Behind Sydney Sweeney's Eugenics Campaign

American Eagle newest spokesmodel joins a long line of great American eugenics influencers like Thomas Jefferson, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump.

Sydney Sweeney for American Eagle. (Screenshot via YouTube)

The camera glides up her denim-clad legs, past her bare, milky-white midsection and settles on piercing blue eyes, framed by locks Rumpelstiltskin spun from the purest Anglo-Saxon straw. ”Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,” she says directly to the camera: “My jeans are blue.”

In a second version of the American Eagle ad, the camera follows as she walks, lingering on her classic Caucasian derriere as brief and thin as the Gettysburg Address. She is a vision of Aryan beauty, a white American dream.

All Hail Sydney Sweeney.

If you’re not Peter Thiel or Robert Griffin III, you probably think American Eagle’s new jeans campaign doesn’t make any sense. Contrary to what people who don’t read books might say, the commercial does not contain a double entendre — a single word or phrase that conveys two different meanings or interpretations. Instead, the commercial featuring a 27-year-old white woman, whom I assumed was Lindsay Lohan (they all look alike to me), employs the homonyms “genes” and “jeans” to describe …

Well, there is only one logical explanation.

Inheriting your mee ma’s Wranglers might be part of a secret white privilege rite of passage, but there’s only one way to interpret this ad. Dollar Tree Sabrina Carpenter’s commercial was a subconscious nod to the increasingly vocal online race science scholars who worship at the altar of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and the masculine white boys who make up the wraparound-shades manosphere. Perhaps you’ve heard Musk’s antisemitic autobot Grok explain how the “good scientists” are white and — like its artificially intelligent, Nazi-saluting owner –associate IQ with race and gender.

The obsession with genetic white supremacy predates Twitter, Elon Musk or Donald Trump’s practice of weaponizing the idea of IQ against Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters and Barack Obama. More than a century before Levi Strauss changed the name of “negro cloth” — the indigo-stained cotton fabric picked, woven and worn by enslaved people — thereby “inventing” blue jeans, eugenics was already trending among people who didn’t wash their legs.

What is Eugenics?

Defined as “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition,” eugenics is older than America. As we previously explained, the concept of whiteness is a product of Enlightenment-era eugenicists practicing an early form of race science.

Primary Sources: How DEI Built America

“Nature, in her most perfect exertions, made men white,” wrote French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in his 1749 36-volume compendium Histoire Naturelle. “The same Nature, after suffering every possible change, still renders them white.”