Sydney Sweeney Has Great Genes

 

American Eagle’s current ad campaign for their jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney is getting a lot of attention. Not all favourable. Some are objecting to it as being full of “Nazi” or “Fascist” “dogwhistles.” 

This puzzled me at first, but now I think I get it. It is seen as a celebration of “white superiority.” In one short, Sweeney starts by saying she is a product of her genes. Including her eye color. The camera wanders down to her cleavage. “Eyes—up here,” she says. The camera moves to her blue eyes. She says “My jeans [genes?] are blue.” Then the overlay, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

This supposedly endorses eugenics, and the supposed superiority of “white” genes. Never a Fascist idea, but a Nazi one.

This objection is itself racist, however, unless you would also object to a black model, or a Native American model, being featured in the same way, as having “great genes.” It can be no more than a thought experiment, but I cannot imagine anyone doing so. 

But it is “white” people who are being discriminated against if they are not permitted to be called beautiful or have their genes praised.

You might counter with a claim about white privilege, some ancient wrong that needs to be redressed.

But Sydney Sweeney has no white privilege. 

Sydney Sweeney is Irish. At least until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, most educated people were aware of historic discrimination against the Irish; those who did not despise the Irish themselves. Attending university in Canada in the 1970s, the student newspaper ran an editorial titled “Let’s Sink Ireland for a Day”—an actual call, if not entirely serious, for genocide. There was no blowback. I have been told several times by women that they had promised their parents never to bring home an Irishman. T.S. Eliot used Sydney Sweeney’s very own surname in these lines to describe an Irish character in 1920: 

Apeneck Sweeney spread his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The Irish were never considered by the larger Anglo world part of any master race with superior genes. More often as a separate, subhuman race. 

There is a reason so many “black” Americans have Irish surnames. Look at Mariah Carey. Look at Rhiannon Giddens. They are probably half Irish. Irish and blacks were long considered the same social class, and commonly intermarried.

“Dumb Blonde” jokes may be part of this continuing prejudice—and such jokes are still perfectly permissible in polite company. As are comments like “do gingers have souls?” 

Talk about blackface? How about whiteface—the usual clown makeup. Note the red hair. The conventional North American clown is actually a stage Irishman, including the bulbous red nose suggesting a drinking habit. An ethnic stereotype.

It is time the Irish had a right to celebrate their genes, and their beauty.