Sydney Sweeney's ‘Great Jeans’ Illuminate the Dangerous Resurgence of Eugenics

^{"Sydney Sweeney" by Jay Dixit, CC 4.0}

American Eagle came under fire recently for an ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. In one ad, Sweeney fiddles with her jeans, saying, "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue." A male narrator finishes with, "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans."

It's a play on homophones, but the wordplay reveals a more sinister element: Sweeney does not just have great American Eagle jeans, she has great American genes. Picking a blonde, blue-eyed, able-bodied all-American girl was not an accident. It was about showcasing what are "good genes," and thus what are "bad genes." It's a modern eugenics movement proudly re-emerging amid a welcoming political climate.

The American eugenics movement has historically promoted the superiority of Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied, wealthy people, leading to harmful policies from the Immigration Act of 1924 barring immigrants from Asia to a practice of unnecessary and undisclosed hysterectomies performed on Black women in the South so widespread it was coined the "Mississippi appendectomy."...