American Eagle's Sydney Sweeney Ad Reveals White America's Racism

Racists always out themselves.American Eagle’s campaign featuring white, blond, blue-eyed actress Sydney Sweeney with the tagline SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS, has triggered explosive national conversations on race, with assertions made by many that the ads elevate whiteness as an ideal and center Nazi eugenics.This morning, a post sat atop my X feed, featuring a white man’s commentary on a video posted by a black woman claiming that she is not welcome at the store.What followed was a swift and fierce parade of ignorance and bigotry by white commentators.This is a single thread out of hundreds of thousands across the social media landscape today, and it reveals just how easily the bile pours from so many white people’s mouths when faced with the mere suggestion of systemic racism, when they are invited to confront our collective national story and examine their personal biases. The knee-jerk responses expose their owners.Watching white Americans immediately reverting to the most dehumanizing and dangerous stereotypes about people of color, you realize that they’re making the greatest case for the prosecution. With almost no provocation, they come wielding nothing thoughtful or nuanced or remotely compassionate. Instead, they bring venom and mockery and supremacy.There’s a sick irony in watching people of the most profound privilege falling over themselves to express their own victimhood, while supposedly calling out the performative martyrdom in someone else. By responding so violently to the critics of the campaign, they are confessing to the merits of the criticism. Methinks they doth protest too much.And these aren’t just extremist online dwellers existing in the artificial atmosphere of social media and reveling in the worst of themselves for sport. They are teachers and truck drivers and restaurant servers and business owners. They are neighbors and co-workers and classmates. They live and move and breathe in communities all over this country. In other words, they, far more than a shop in a mall or a celebrity or a billboard, are the American experience for people of color here—and we can’t ignore that.I’ll leave it to each of you to decide how you feel about the American Eagle Sweeney Ad and whether you believe it was simply a poorly thought-out pun gone wrong or an intentional racist dog whistle; whether it reveals a tone-deaf lack of self-awareness or a terrifying corporate agenda. These conclusions are important, as are the conversations around them, but in some ways, they’re beside the point. The point is, in defending the campaign in the manner in which they are, far too many white people are the loudest and most convincing evidence of the very racism they’re supposedly refuting.It’s instructive to see the resentment and rage bubbling just below the surface of so many white people’s existence; how easily they launch into dehumanizing verbal filth because that is what is stored up in their hearts. Long after this campaign fades from memory, we’ll still be left with who we are as people, all that is being stirred up and exposed.I don’t know what this moment is revealing about American Eagle as a company or Sydney Sweeney as a human being, but what I do know is that it is revealing how afflicted this nation is with the cancer of racism, and how close we are to losing our soul completely.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe