The banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix's racism

Doreen St. Felix giving a talk, “Track Changes: The Authority of the Critic in Authoritarian Times,” at the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, March 2025

On August 2, New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Felix wrote an essay, “The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans,” criticizing Sweeney’s recent American Eagle jeans campaign, in which Sweeney wears classic denim and talks about her “great jeans.” You can tell many of the folks criticizing the essay never bothered to read it because one of the main attacks is that liberals are hypocrites who had nothing to say when Beyoncé did her denim ads. Except that’s literally how St. Felix begins:

Two American blondes have recently hawked denim. Beyoncé, an ambassador for Levi’s, dressed in outlaw drag, arrives at a semi-deserted laundromat […] but what she’s selling in the commercial is not Levi’s […] her project, in this “Cowboy Carter” era, has been to cast herself as the real patriot, a protector of this country’s traditions from the fraudulent claims of white supremacists […] she is burnishing a heritage brand in her Black-queen image. Americana can be hers, too.

That brings us to […] Sydney Sweeney, who recently became the face of American Eagle. What is this campaign selling? […] No doubt the minds behind the Sweeney campaign wanted to stir memories of Brooke Shields, declaring to Richard Avedon’s camera, in 1980: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” […] The element of perversion, the artistic touch, in that Calvin Klein ad was Shields’s age, which was fifteen. Sweeney is twenty-seven. No great artist directed these commercials. The allusion is incoherent, unless, of course, we root around for other meanings, and we don’t have to search for long: genes, referring to Sweeney’s famously large breasts; genes, referring to her whiteness […] Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass.

This is the kind of undergraduate seminar hermeneutics one is meant to shed by sophomore year, the logic of queering, a method that insists every text encodes its own subversion, if only one teases it out, and which comes from queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, who taught queering as a way of reading against the grain to show that what appears normative, be it heterosexuality or whiteness, is actually constructed, performative, and open to subversion. It’s not that the text actually expresses such things, but whether you can adequately argue that such things are in the text even if they aren’t, or even if it expresses the opposite. Butler, unsurprisingly, also famously taught that sex roles are similarly performative and can be subverted, regardless of the facts, or indeed against them, leading the way to the trans movement. One example of queering would be to take Hamlet and argue that instead of a story about family duty and revenge, it’s actually about Hamlet’s homoerotic desire to penetrate Horatio. Bonus points if you can tie this into an argument about how Hamlet’s gender performance with Ophelia destabilizes masculinity, how “Hamlet’s delay” is not a problem of Renaissance psychology but rather the gender performativity of a closeted gay man, or even better, how his cruelty toward Ophelia is not misognyny but the overcompensatory reaction formation of his efforts to pass as “normal” when he is, in fact, a trans woman. It’s all sophistry, of course, but you can certainly see St. Felix playing the game, if poorly.

Applying the gimmick to her own essay and reading St. Felix the way she reads everything else, you might tease out the detail that she calls both Sweeney and Beyoncé “American blondes,” and although both women dye their hair, you simply talk about how blonde hair is white hair, how blonde hair is a symbol of whiteness as much as the afro is of blackness, how there’s a deliberate racial appropriation by Beyoncé, who not only dons white hair but the stereotypical denim of white western wear. Then you talk about black women and fake hair more generally, the prevalence of black women in weaves and wigs, and maybe even comment on black appropriation of Arabic names such as Jamal, Aaliyah, Rashad, Latifah, and Omar, tying that into the fact that Sweeney goes by her first and last name whereas Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter goes simply by her first name to signal that she’s a diva like Madonna or Cher, but also, you queeringly conclude, because blackness is inherently thieving in nature. That, roughly speaking, is how it’s done. And if anyone accuses you of racist rhetoric because you referred to blackness as thieving by nature, you simple deploy the motte-and-bailey fallacy and withdraw to claiming that you are only talking about blackness, not black people, which is a refrain that we’ve all grown used to hearing whenever anyone pushes back against genocidal talk about “whiteness.”

Simply put, you extend the symbol or concept far beyond what the text can support, but the creative ability to produce overdetermined deconstructions of this nature is an art form in itself, although even here, St. Felix isn’t particularly good at it. The caricature I painted above with Hamlet is already better constructed than what she gives us, and she has New Yorker editors helping her, yet she literally tells the reader, this ain’t white people being pedophiles like with Brooke Shields, so why do they like Sydney Sweeney? Because tits and racism. She admits she cannot make sense of the Sweeney ad because it isn’t pedophilic, saying, “The allusion is incoherent, unless, of course, we root around for other meanings.” You’re not supposed to root around for other meanings, St. Felix. That’s what we in the industry call bullshitting. And the bullshit she comes up with is that the ad makes a pun involving the company’s good jeans and Sweeney’s good genes, which St. Felix tells us is a reference to “Sweeney’s famously large breasts,” fair enough, and “her whiteness,” where I object. This cascade of semiotic free-associations metastasizes from a pun in a denim ad into a sociology of white existence within several sentences, bearing absolutely none of the shame that a sociologist worth their degree would feel burning their cheeks if they were to base any conclusion on such interpretive strip-mining. Also, can I just say about the phrase “the Black man’s hunger for ass,” wow. Literally anyone in the world would probably happily agree to have their work published in The New Yorker, yet the best they can curate from the pool of applicants is a filthy little bigot who thinks the Sweeney ad was a hit because of racism and tits? St. Felix adds:

Sweeney, on the precipice of totalizing fame, has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess. To them, she signals, as my colleague Lauren Michele Jackson wrote, a “rejoicing in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left.”

People love Sweeney because she represents anti-woke beauty, or to put it more simply, beauty. Unapologetic beauty. Sweeney is classically pretty and clearly unashamed to show it. And that, sadly, is refreshing. Not because of overzealous feminism alone, but because of overzealous feminism and blacktivism. It’s the same reason people went gaga for Top Gun: Maverick or The Super Mario Bros Movie. Not because they were propped up by admirers of Aryanism, but merely because they were refreshingly free of what The Critical Drinker calls The Message. Sweeney is not a trans beauty. Nor a morbidly obese beauty. Her beauty doesn’t depend on you being politically progressive in order to appreciate it. She’s just pretty. And, yes, white. And more than that, pretty in a kind of 1950s classic white American way. Not in a racist sense, but in the sense that there was a time when white Americans were not being so put upon for being white, and could rejoice in their own beauty without having to carry an attendant degree of shame. Never mind that slavery lasted for only 89 years in the United States, or that less than 2-8% of Americans, North and South, owned slaves. Still, whites must apparently forever hate themselves over it. Sweeney doesn’t even bother to reject this. It’s as if she never even heard The Message. Suffice it to say, it has been exhausting to listen to racist woke activists, and increasingly repulsive as their rhetoric has gone from trying to guilt white people to simply dehumanizing them in increasingly disturbing ways. Sweeney bucks all these trends, exuding a kind of uncancellable confidence in her own beauty, but in a way that comes off as wholesome rather than hateful. St. Felix continues:

The American Eagle campaign, its presentation of Americana as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, is lowest-common-denominator stuff. Decoding Sweeney’s presumed political affiliation—is she liberal or conservative?—doesn’t give this ad more meaning. It is what it is.

In the end, it’s a dull, but not overly offensive essay. Some of the worst pull quotes, taken out of context, are bad. But not so bad that I would not want to read more of her work or, if I saw her at a cocktail party, walk over and say hello. I would never read this essay alone and conclude that the author is a bad person, and certainly not that they are racist. I would probably just think to myself that they’re woke. But what has ruined St. Felix in the estimation of many this week is not the essay, which apparently no one read but me. Instead, it’s the fact that, after it came out, the internet did what the internet does, and all her old Twitter posts were unearthed. And damn, it’s not good. Here’s Ariel Wilber at The New York Post listing some of St. Felix’s greatest hits:

• “You all are the worst. Go nurse your f–king Oedipal complexes and leave the earth to the browns and the women.”

• “I hate white men.”

• She said she “writes like no white is watching.”

• She said she “would be heartbroken if I had kids with a white guy.”

• She said white people’s poor hygiene “literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphilis.”

• She said “we lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness” and blamed environmental destruction on “white capitalism.”

And:

And:

Wow okay, so it turns out she’s about as racist as Robert Mugabe. But look, St. Felix is, at the end of the day, just another black racist writer enjoying a role that is far more prestigious than her “insights” would seem to warrant. More importantly, we know there’s no way that someone with views like hers would ever get, or keep, a job at The New Yorker if they aren’t “diverse.” Just imagine a white writer, and let’s imagine one of far greater talents and intellect, saying even one of the things she said above, but saying it about black people. They’d be fired in an instant. In other words, St. Felix is what we would nowadays call a DEI writer — someone who, given everything we know about them, would never be able to enjoy the level of success they now do if they did not check that box. And no, I am not saying that she should be fired. I am saying that racists like her are a dime a dozen now, and that black privilege is quite obviously a real phenomenon. Black writers of this persuasion write racists posts like the ones above because they know that, among their woke base, it sells. They may rage when they see Trump throw politically incorrect meat to this MAGA base, but they do the exact same thing on their side. And while I do get the feeling from her social media posts that she’s genuinely and profoundly racist at heart, for many others who say things like this, it’s merely a cynical provocation for clicks. But this kind of hateful behavior only drives us apart.

Black writers talking trash about white people at every available opportunity is not doing black or white people any service. What we should be aiming for, in my view, is greater appreciation of both white and black beauty. People like St. Felix could be doing the work of cultivating a love for white beauty in the black community, or if she prefers, black beauty in the white community. Lord in the morning, we know both sides could stand to appreciate the beauty of the other far more than they currently do, especially given the current state of our politics. Instead, something has happened to leftist black Americans, similar to what has happened to Palestinians and leftist South Koreans. Namely, they have become so clouded by bitterness that it has become their identity and distorts their reality. Call it VDS, or Victimhood Derangement Syndrome. The sad thing is, when you read St. Felix, despite her poorly constructed queering and the soft racism that gets past her editors, there really is a good writer there. I have this complaint of Ta-Nehisi Coates too, who might’ve been a great writer if his politics had not blunted the force of his prose. And she too could be using her impressive talents to better address racism, or sing black praise, or prove through prose the undeniable beauty of black achievement in this country and, yes, the undeniable beauty of black people, black bodies, black skin. The unapologetic black beauty of someone like Beyoncé, or unapologetic white beauty of someone like Sweeney, does more in this regard than any essay by St. Felix. Meanwhile, all those writers, cynically peddling racist garbage, are following an avenue that would not be open to them in the first place if not for things like the banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix’s racism.