Can’t we say ‘good genes’ anymore? The backlash to the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad explained

And just as the company attempted to play down the controversy, the White House decided to weigh in with its full strength. Spokesperson Steven Cheung characterised the criticism as “cancel culture run amok”, Vice President JD Vance called Sweeney an “All-American beautiful woman”, and President Donald Trump on Monday (August 4) wrote, “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there.”

Is it a bad thing to say someone has good genes?

The phrase “good genes” is used today often to compliment someone’s physical attributes. However, it has a complicated history with direct ties to eugenics and white supremacist propaganda.

Eugenics is a discredited scientific theory which argues for selective breeding, meaning intentional human reproduction to increase the presence of genetic traits viewed as ‘desirable’. The term was coined in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) by Francis Galton, a British natural scientist who drew on Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin’s theory suggests that as species evolve, individuals with traits that can adapt to their environmental requirements are more likely to survive and reproduce, thus passing these traits on to their offspring.

Galton advocated for selective breeding to give “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable”.

In the US, eugenics was introduced by Charles Davenport, who founded the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, New York, in 1910 to “improve the natural, physical, mental, and temperamental qualities of the human family”, according to its brochure. What was initially an academic interest in identifying “undesirable” traits, like dwarfism, mental ability, and criminality, extended into a larger social movement in the 1920s and ‘30s.

This had political implications too, with states such as Indiana and California implementing sterilisation laws targeting the poor and disabled, as well as Native Americans, Latin Americans, and Black people. Between 1907 and the 1970s, more than 60,000 people across 32 states were forcibly sterilised for being “mentally deficient”. In 2003, then-California Governor Gray Davis apologised for the state’s role after it was revealed that the state’s forced sterilisation campaign had inspired Nazi Germany’s efforts at ethnic cleansing of its minorities, predominantly Jews, ethnic communities like the Sinti and Roma, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities. And the Nazis most infamously presented the archetype of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white person as having “pure blood” and therefore, aspirational.

Eugenics as an idea lost popularity in the 1940s after the actions of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler came to be reviled. However, subtler practices, such as involuntary sterilisation, forced institutionalisation and social ostracisation, have continued in the decades post-WWII. Such policies disproportionately targeted women and people of colour. Writing in The Conversation in 2020, academic Alexandra Minna Stern noted that Black women were sterilised over three times the rate of white women and over 12 times the rate of white men between 1950 and 1966. Federal programs like Medicaid funded forced sterilisation between the 1960s and 1970s, impacting over 100,000 Black, Latino and Indigenous women, Stern wrote.

And why are critics questioning the timing of this ad?

According to critics, the wordplay in the ad is malicious when viewed with the composite actions of the Trump administration, including its unprecedented crackdown on immigration. Since January, the president has imposed a national emergency at the country’s shared border with Mexico, denied entry to asylum-seekers, authorised nationwide immigration raids, aggressively pushed for self-deportations, and has stepped up the ante on third-country deportations, despite legal challenges.

This, coupled with other actions by the administration, such as the repeal of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, has caused concern that the administration has stepped beyond serving its primarily white, conservative, MAGA voter base.

The president has been at the forefront of such messaging, telling a rally of his supporters that they had “good genes”. Last October, he said that illegal immigrants who commit murder have “bad genes.” Along the campaign trail, the president also claimed that illegal immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, using language that directly echoed Adolf Hitler’s 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf. Such language has been endorsed by two-thirds of Republican voters across the country, according to an October 2024 poll by the University of Massachusetts.

In recent years, conservative commentators, ranging from TV host Tucker Carlson to billionaire CEO Elon Musk, have also leaned into the controversial Great Replacement Theory, coined by French writer Renaud Camus in 2010. According to the theory, white Americans face the threat of becoming a minority and losing their jobs to non-white immigrants. The Republican Party leaned into such messaging in the run-up to the 2024 election, claiming that the Democratic Party was importing immigrants to win the election.