The flailing American Eagle clothing company is under extreme fire after publishing a racy—pun intended—ad in which pouty lipped actress Sydney Sweeney spins around and rolls on the floor in massively-oversized jeans in pseudo porn clip angles and suggestive poses while the monotone narrator drones “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans.”

American Eagle claims they didn’t mean to suggest that blonde, blue eyed, sex figures were racially superior in any way, and that they didn’t mean any harm. Of course, as usual, it’s the “we are so very sorry if we have offended anyone” trope in defense of themselves.

As usual with these things, the left culture sees it as an attack on people of color, the right culture sees the left backlash as an attack on white people.

Wonder what the reaction would have been if the model had instead been Beyoncé. No doubt there would have been no outrage; in fact, American Eagle would have been deemed very clever and even artistic for their play on words. They may have even won awards. But nope.

I find it hard to believe that American Eagle didn’t consider the possibility of extreme backlash before giving the greenlight to the project. I tend to think they knew it would be highly controversial and that’s the reason they did it. They may have also thought that due to Trump anti DEI culture that the tide was turning against racial stereotypes, thus they would get more praise than hate. They may have thought wrong.

At any rate, the story is relevant is because the response will determine where the culture is with racial sensitivity intolerance for what no doubt, at a minimum, can be considered racy humor.