The Right Jeans
Black Americans' Genes Crafted the Beloved Blue Jeans
Boston, MA, (Guerrilla Mag) 09/22/2025—American Eagle set the country’s marketing and political world on fire with its new back-to-school jeans campaign. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” Sydney Sweeney says at the start of the campaign. She is wearing blue denim jeans and is lying down, her back arched, as the camera zooms in on her, zipping her pants. The matching denim top has been unbuttoned. She stares directly at the camera, her sultry voice at its best, “My jeans are blue.”
In large capitalized font and a prominent booming voice, it proudly proclaims, “SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS.” American Eagle’s advertisement got many reactions. Yet the jeans fit and style never came up. Most people wondered why the brand chose to do that. Wearing jeans isn’t a crime but making it about a white woman’s genes makes the whole thing distasteful.
This isn’t about who wears jeans but about the genes of those who made them possible.
The Indigo Plant and Cotton Started It All
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, during the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the horrific abuse of the enslaved, cotton and the Indigo plant made the southern states of America and the white plantation owners very wealthy. From these resources and free labor, the enslaved used indigo to dye fabric a beautiful blue color.
The color of the dye, made from indigo, held significance for Africans and other cultures, who viewed it as a symbol of wealth and nobility. Cotton, the next largest export in the South, has historically generated substantial wealth for Southern plantation farmers. The upkeep of growing cotton and weaving it together was extremely violent, tedious, and paid in the blood and sweat of many enslaved Africans. There were long, dry, scorching, southern summers in the fields from sun-up to sun-down. That’s how your favorite pair of blue jeans was made possible in the present day.
The Negro Cloth Turned into a Fashion Icon.
Everything is being intentionally erased and rewritten to make the past more palatable for those who partook in evil, from history books in classrooms to social media posts being used by the government for censorship. That is why in 2025, a jeans company can make a nazi-light commercial about jeans, and people just nod along. It became a pop-culture fascination for a week, and then the audience moved on. That is because social media, politics, and society in the digital age, everything moves fast, although recordedforever. These days, it’s not about what you, the individual, stand for, but how other people perceive you.
Nobody cares about the meaning and origins of fashion, or even why it is radical and political, where our clothes come from, and how we style them. It matters, because it is history, and although some may like to erase it, some of us fully embrace it.
Their Genes All Look Good in Jeans.
The enslaved Africans not only had to face high levels of abuse but were also marked in many ways by different rules in what they wore, specific ways to wear their natural hair, and what fabric they could wear. Naturally, because they were evil, the plantation owners had them use the same denim blue they had made all day. There is so much culture in the United States that barely gets any attention from the white public at large. They only give an applause or two for their definition of black excellence. They loved black culture but hate the black man, woman, and child. Jeans were made by and popularized by African American ancestors, are still owned by white men in most of the major jean brands today. You see why they made the commercial? They want white genes to be great again, just the infamous slogan of Trump. There is heavy push of white is right but like decades before, the works and spirits of the African American is everlasting and will continue to invent, create and prosper.