Trump Faces 3rd Impeachment Threat

For some critics, the wordplay crossed an uncomfortable line because Sweeney is blonde, blue-eyed and white. They argued that praising her “great genes” could evoke the history of eugenics and racial theories that treated certain inherited physical characteristics as superior. Some online commentators went considerably further, comparing the imagery with white-supremacist or even Nazi propaganda.

Others considered those interpretations excessive. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published commentary explicitly rejecting the idea that the American Eagle commercial itself amounted to a Nazi “dog whistle.” The controversy therefore became partly a dispute over whether critics were uncovering meaningful racial subtext or reading far more ideology into a provocative jeans advertisement than its creators intended.