^{Photo credit: American Eagle‘s Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans Campaign}

“The problem with crying wolf
so many times over the years
is that it waters down a legitimate cry.”
~ Vito Giacalone

By now everyone has probably already weighed in on the new American Eagle Great Jeans campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, or at the very least heard about the controversy surrounding it and formed an opinion. So, of course, y’all know I had to add my two cents. 🤷‍♀️😏😎

But here’s the part you probably won’t like: I see absolutely nothing wrong with this ad campaign!!!

As a half-black woman, I am in no way bothered by the fact that Sydney Sweeney has either great genes or great jeans. And I applaud American Eagle for not caving under the fear of the radical mob mentality that is ‘cancel culture’, for standing by their campaign and not belching out an apology or pulling their ad in order to pacify the promoters of this latest garbage backlash.

Sydney Sweeney having great genes does not in any way, shape or form take away from the fact that Beyonce does as well, or the fact that Lizzo does, or that Priyanka Chopra, Shay Mitchell, Naomi Campbell, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, Constance Wu, Nicole Scherzinger, or any other female also has great genes.

Had that ad been done with a black woman highlighting her natural hair texture as being the ‘great genes’ she inherited, or an Asian woman using her unique eye shape as the ‘great genes’ in question, the talk around the American Eagle campaign would have been very different. But because they used a pretty white woman with bkond hair and blue eyes, we somehow feel it’s okay to say that American Eagle is promoting ‘eugenics’.

{Eugenics is a theory developed largely by Sir Francis Galton in 1883 (that has since been widely discredited as being ‘unscientific’ ) which claims that the genetic quality of human beings can be ‘improved’ through selective breeding, whose doctrines were later radicalized by the Nazis in their quest to (re)create the fabled ‘Aryan race’}

It is literally crying wolf. It is us inventing a problem that does not exist in order to push an extremist agenda.

Based off this logic, we can then surmise that having a straight couple in a movie means the producers are anti-gay, or having a biological man as the hero in a novel means the author is anti-trans.

Sounds stupid, right?

“Those with a perpetual victim mindset
tend to create the situations
from which they suffer.”
~ Steve Maraboli

Remember when Terry Crews was attacked on social media for saying “Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are in this together.”? He later clarified this statement by explaining: “I am saying if both Black and Whites don’t continue to work together—bad attitudes and resentments can create a dangerous self-righteousness.”

Well, here we are, and that dangerous self-righteousness is unfolding right in front of our eyes.

We have arrived at that point in society where it is now offensive to have an opinion if you’re white, blond, and blue-eyed because your opinion has counted for too long, so you now need to take several seats and stfu. The irony? That we are now trying to do to white people exactly what we have complained was done to us for centuries: to silence them, to hide them away, to make them ‘less’.

In much the same way that one star does not have to die for another to be visible in the night sky, one race does not have to be downplayed for another to have its shine. And while a certain blond late night talk show guest host correctly stated that ‘blond white women have always had representation’, it certainly does not mean that we now need to pretend they don’t exist in order for other races to feel seen.

And therein lies one of the biggest dangers of social media – the mob mentality that latches on to a perceived infraction and snowballs it into cultural chaos, pitting one race or ethnicity against another, dividing us as a society even further by making everything ‘Us versus Them’.

But here’s the thing >>>

NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU!!!

And not everything needs to be turned into an epic battle of ‘Us versus Them’, because much like the boy who cried wolf, when real offences occur, people are ultimately going to turn a blind eye and dismiss your demands for justice and accountability as nothing more than the usual overdramatics of an agitator.

Trying to drag down American Eagle by hurling malicious (and unfounded) accusations at them for daring to use a blond blue-eyed woman in their campaign is not the equivalent of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white woman, or Thurgood Marshall advocating to end racial segregation in American public schools.

No, sir.

This is us weaponizing our generational pain. This is us adopting that same sense of entitlement we accused others of. This is us stomping our feet and throwing a tantrum because somebody dared to say that a white woman is pretty, and our inherent inferiority complex left us butthurt because we think that means we’re not pretty too. This is our learned narcissism luxuriating in the comfort of its victim mentality, certain that anything which does not directly sing our praises must therefore be aimed at us in a negative light.

This is us fabricating friction in a society already too on edge, when we should be focused on the very real issues going on in both our individual countries and the world as a whole, when we should be coming together as one society of human beings and reaching out our hands to help each other up instead of tear each other down.

My mother always laughs at me when I say this, but there are times when I honestly wish an alien invasion the likes of which Will Smith faced in Independence Day would actually occur … Maybe then we’d finally realize that we are more alike than we are different, when we’re forced to put aside our egos and grievances, forced to work together with one common end goal: Survival !!!

And because this one little ad campaign sparked so much bogus controversy, I honestly had a hard time picking just one thing to focus our quote section on, but to close out today’s post, I’d like to share a few words of wisdom borrowed from people much smarter than me on the dangerous mindset that is victim mentality:

“A victim mentality is a prolonged form of suicide.“

~ Steve Maraboli: Life, the Truth, and Being Free

“You can’t expect to be a ‘Victor’
if you’re living with a ‘Victim’ mentality.”

~ Billy Cox

“People with victim mentality
spend their energy not on achieving their target
but on meaningless complaints.”

~ Sunday Adelaja

“Victims seek to blame others for their problems
or blame outside circumstances.
This may make them feel better in the short term,
but it leads to a life of
anger, helplessness, and despair.”

~ Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:
A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself
as a victim of circumstance or of someone else’s behavior
in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion
and thereby get something from another.
Caring and conscientious people
cannot stand to see anyone suffering
and the manipulator often finds it
easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation.”

~ George K. Simon Jr., In Sheep’s Clothing:
Understanding and Dealing With Manipulative People

“The psychological phrase ‘secondary gain’
describes the behavior of using illness or pain to attract attention.
There is another term to describe this: victim mindset.
Both may feel comforting for a time
but, sadly, prevent all efforts to live a fulfilling life.“

~ Charles F. Glassman

“When absorbing the sadness of the loss,
we must concentrate on bad guys to demonize,
or black holes of sympathy in which we get to play
the cosmic victim of terrible circumstances.
Demonizing and victimizing are the sources of those stories
in which we can get so woefully stuck.”

~ John P. Schuster

“While it is easy to get caught up
in the beliefs and attitudes of others,
it is easier still to make one’s self
a victim of circumstance.
Victims of circumstance believe
they have no power over their lives,
since they are merely the play-things of fate.
Since they believe this, it is therefore so.”

~ Stephen Richards

“In a world infatuated with victimhood,
has trauma emerged as a passport to status –
our red badge of courage?”

~ Parul Sehgal

“Continuing to play the victim is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Blaming others for your station in life
will indeed make you a victim,
but the perpetrator will be your own self,
not life or those around you.”

~ Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin – Living Large In Geiggityville

“Someone with a victim mindset
is always looking for a villain to blame
and a situation to suffer from.”

~ Steve Maraboli

“There are two different kinds of people in the world.
There are people who instinctively look for
every chance to be a ‘victim’,
and those who look for every chance to rise above,
regardless of where they are in life
and what’s happening around them.”

~ Christopher Hawke

“It’s called victim mentality,
When people choose to be the direct product
of everything that happened to them,
the direct product of every single pair of hands that hurt them.
And the world, to these people, must bend over backwards
in order to accommodate their wounds.”

~ C. JoyBell C.

“Perception is everything.
If you see everything through the lens of the naysayers
or through a victim perspective,
then it’s hard to get what you really want in life.”

~ Keisha Blair, Holistic Wealth: 32 Life Lessons to
Help You Find Purpose, Prosperity, and Happiness)

“Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group
promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best
and dangerous at worst,
which eventually only leads to further alienation.
Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults
may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility
needed to be fully open to what life has to offer
and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas.
Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences
and acknowledge the humanity of others.”

~ Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score:
Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“The feeling of superiority is a defect
that tends to accompany a victim mentality…
as if you deserved any merit for being a product of fate.”

~ Rosa Montero

“You can’t play the role of a victim all your life
without becoming one in the end.”

~ Danilo Kiš: Garden, Ashes

“Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage
before outright aggression.”

~ Stefan Molyneux

“As I’d seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims
sometimes don’t notice when they become oppressors.”

~ Souad Mekhennet, I Was Told to Come Alone:
My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad

“Let us not become victims of a crippling reasoning pattern.
If we want to improve our decision-making and critical thinking,
we must recognize our mental biases and be willing to overcome them.
Let us avoid creating arguments to confirm pre-existing beliefs at all costs
and invest in a ‘sunk cost fallacy.’
Better alight from a car out of control than drive it off the cliff.”

~ Erik Pevernagie, The infinite Wisdom of Meditation

Until next time …

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