My Genes Are Blue: How American Eagle and Dunkin’ Are Selling Whiteness

Something uncanny has procured itself in the cultural consciousness of American media in the past week, a tonal shift that, although unsurprising given the current political climate, feels jarringly regressive and reactionary; the tipping point, undoubtedly, being American Eagle’s latest campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney as the white all-American temptress clad in denim. The advert, a washed-out slice of Americana where denim is framed as sartorial inheritance and the word genetics slides in under the guise of a pun, immediately caused an uproar on social media for its not-so-subtle invocation of eugenics and white supremacist implications. Sweeney lays sprawled on a white backdrop as the camera pans over her lithe frame, rambling about genetics: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My genes are blue.” The climactic line is delivered after a slow, sensuous build: denim, light, body, sign, the pun breaking surface and landing on whiteness as aesthetic provenance.

The history of denim as a cultural signifier is steeped in American mythos, inseparable from settler-colonial expansion, the fantasy of manifest destiny, the iconography of the wild west, and the violent ideologies that undergirded the building of a nation. Denim stands in American visual culture for a mythologized origin story: the self-made settler, the frontier labourer, the rugged individual carving nationhood out of stolen land. It is as much a fabric as it is an aesthetic alibi, suturing that violence into an embodied and material history.

Here, the invocation of genes and jeans being blue reads as a concatenation of aesthetic signifiers rooted in a history of whiteness. Blue can be read as a reference to Sweeney’s blue eyes, and the ad emphasizes genes determining “even… eye colour,” making the punchline all the more tangible in its subliminal gesturing. Sweeney’s blue eyes as a recessive genetic quality are one of the hallmarks of whiteness, fetishized as emblematic of purity and desirable bloodlines within American and European racial imaginaries. In this light, the ad’s invocation of blue folds into a dense chain of signifiers: denim blue, eye blue, bloodline blue, all sutured into a single aesthetic gesture that reinscribes whiteness as both commodity and inheritance.

Blue, as of the last decade, undoubtedly also carries another semiotic weight: the blue line, Blue Lives Matter, and the reactionary swell of pro-police solidarity in response to the uprisings against the systemic murders of Black and brown people by law enforcement in the United States. In this register, blue is not just denim or eye colour; it is a cultural signifier charged with the politics of whiteness, order, and the state’s monopoly on violence, making the ad’s punchline resonate uneasily against the backdrop of contemporary racial politics.

The uncanny resonance of this moment only intensified days later with Dunkin’s Golden Hour Refresher campaign starring Gavin Casalegno. Reclined in syrupy branded summer light, Casalegno smiles into the camera and offers the line: “This tan? Genetics. I just got my colour analysis back. Golden summer, literally.” On paper, it is a throwaway quip; in the wake of American Eagle’s invocation of whiteness discourse, it feels especially pointed.

If American Eagle sutured inheritance to whiteness through denim and eye colour, Dunkin does so through skin. The joke collapses appearance into biology and tanning into cultural signifier. “This tan? Genetics” reads, in this context, less like humour and more like the aesthetic naturalization of a body coded for golden light, for branded sunlight, for a very specific vision of American summer. It is in its own way a commercial for privilege as much as for iced tea. In Guy Debord’s terms, this is the “spectacle” at work: not selling a product but mediating a social relation through an image. The tan becomes not skin but sign, not leisure but the appearance of inherited ease, a simulation of belonging packaged as a priori. What circulates here is not the drink but the body as commodity-image, where the visual proof of privilege becomes the advertisement’s true currency.

As with Sweeney’s blue, the invocation of genetics here carries its own chain of signifiers: golden skin, summer glow, a whiteness which conspicuously tans itself. In American visual culture, tanning has never been neutral. While Black and brown people are born with melanin as biological inheritance, white skin acquiring a tan has historically operated as a classed aesthetic performance, a sign of the means to seek out the sun, the time to linger in it, and the cultural insulation to do so without its associations of labour.

After the Second World War, as suburbanization and the rise of the middle class restructured leisure culture, tanning in the United States became less about accident than about performance. To be tanned was not simply to be touched by sunlight; it was to mark oneself as someone whose life was structured enough to choose sun as recreation rather than endure it as work. The body became a surface on which leisure and by extension class mobility could be read. Dunkin’s invocation collapses that social history into biology, folding privilege into bloodline.

In both campaigns, what surfaces is not simply marketing but the cultural industry’s capacity, as Stuart Hall in Encoding/Decoding writes, “to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions of ourselves as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture.” The near-simultaneous invocation of genetics across two mass-market campaigns at the same time is not coincidence; it is the apparatus speaking, at a very specific moment in culture. The joke lands because the discourse it draws from is becoming normalized in popular discourse once again.

Hall reminds us in Cultural Identity and Diaspora: “Identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse… produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies.” The American Eagle and Dunkin ads are those strategies. They are not describing bodies; they are producing subjects. When Sweeney says, “My genes are blue,” and Casalegno quips, “This tan? Genetics,” they are hailing viewers into a subject position where belonging is imagined as encoded in the body. This is identity as “the point of suture,” where discourse and subjectivity meet under the illusion of being innate. Both ads function as interpellative strategies, dog whistles disguised as kitsch, hailing the viewer to identify with or disidentify from the cultural formation they pull from.

Seen through Hall’s “arena of consent and resistance,” these campaigns are not accidents but cultural texts engaged in hegemonic struggle. They arise in a moment of profound anxiety around identity in the United States, where the nation’s imagined unity feels frayed. In that space of vulnerability, popular culture performs the work of reasserting belonging through the body, rallying around lineage when every other anchor, economic, national, cultural, and social is unstable.

What is most telling is not just the ads but the way the brands narrate themselves. In a LinkedIn post, American Eagle’s CMO calls the campaign’s double meaning “power beyond anything I could have ever imagined.” That word names the thing the backlash intuited: the pun is not a neutral joke. It is a site of identity production, one that leans on whiteness, inheritance, and belonging as cultural raw material. In a moment where fascism, far-right ideology, neo-Nazism, and “traditional values” discourse haunt the American register, what we are seeing with American Eagle and Dunkin is the mass-cultural beta test of that logic, repackaged as ironic retro kitsch.

And now that site, the body, the pun, the blue eyes and tanned skin, the discourse surrounding it becomes what Hall calls the contested terrain. These brands are not passive participants but deliberate actors, tapping into the aesthetics of white American nostalgia with just enough plausible deniability to escape their own implications. American Eagle’s official statement that “the campaign is and was always about the jeans, her jeans, her story” only underlines this tension. That insistence on narrative neutrality becomes the ideological cover: the joke is stripped back to denim while the signifiers it mobilizes circulate in the cultural field. The contestation here is two-fold. On one level, it is about power itself: the invocation of whiteness and inheritance as stabilizing myths in the face of crumbling capitalism (see MAGA and every trope it stands for). But beneath that sits a deeper struggle: the war over perception, over semiotics as the ground on which reality is written. Both left and right attempt to seize this moment, because it is the codification of race and hierarchy into the fabric of cultural signification that allows bourgeois society to reproduce itself.