I was all for representation in politics, until I had to think this much about a white guy’s wife. But here we are, a week and change away from yet another most-important-election-in-American-history, again wondering out loud about J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha Vance.
The latest is a sprawling feature about her, her work history, and her (presumed) politics in the Cut, which tries to untangle the mystery that is Vance. “She has largely kept her own beliefs—political and otherwise—inscrutable even to those close to her,” Irin Carmon writes. The piece includes quotes from former friends and colleagues who remain mystified by her silent cosign of her husband’s radically awful politics. “Initially, I thought, Surely she can’t be okay with this, and she’s going to divorce him in time,” one former friend told the Cut. “Then I saw her at the Republican National Convention and thought, Could she actually be on board?”
Let’s just get to the answer the short way: Yes, she’s on board. It does not matter that her parents are Indian immigrants, or that she was raised Hindu, or that she has remained tight-lipped about her political opinions. There have been plenty of attempts to read the tea leaves, given that she clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh (before he was on the Supreme Court) and Chief Justice John Roberts (when he was), but the truth is largely already in front of us.
What ultimately matters is who she’s married to, and that she remains married to him. Vance here has not said too much about her own politics or how much she agrees with her husband, but we don’t need to know too much about Vance’s personal ideology to know where she lands. She’s married to the originator of the ideology in question, and so her stance is clear. We just don’t like it, and we want to give her more chances to escape.
It is perhaps time to say the ugly part out loud: We would not be so mystified by Vance’s loud or quiet cosign of her husband were she white. It’s her identity and experiences—brown, educated, lawyer, first generation—that puzzle people when they realize that she’s probably more aligned with her husband than we understand. Were we talking about, say, Sally Vance, fellow Appalachian bootstrap-puller, there would be less confusion over what she has very clearly demonstrated through her relationship. For women, marriages are personal and political; they provide protection, but they also demand fealty. Vance, again and again, offers that loyalty, be it by her appearance at the Republican National Convention for a speech or by her silence when her idiot husband says he loves his wife, even though “obviously she’s not a white person.”
It’s not as if she hasn’t made some attempts to defend J.D. either, like her ham-fisted efforts to understand his now-notorious “childless cat ladies” comment. “What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country,” she told Tucker Carlson in August. This was absolutely not what he was really saying. Even opting to speak to a Fox News host amid relative media silence is a position unto itself. Her allegiances are not to her race, her gender, the community she was born into. They’re to her husband, and that’s an agreement women have been making since the advent of the marriage license. For political wives, that deal is often even more explicit. Vance is opting for a less bombastic version of what first and second ladies have done, election after election. Her quietude does not make her enigmatic.
The public hope around Vance seems to be that she could soften her husband, that her position in a minority group could sway him toward a more moderate stance when it comes to abortion or immigration. But why does it feel more likely that Vance would push her husband to the left, and not that they would veer in the same direction, further right? We know so little about her and where she comes from ideologically that we shouldn’t assume she’s liberal in the first place—even if people used to assume she was.
What white voters, conservative and liberal alike, seem to forget is the long tail of the model-minority myth, one that many in the South Asian diaspora have aligned themselves with for decades. From Dinesh D’Souza to Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy to your loser cousin who’s convinced he got into Georgetown because he’s smarter than everyone and not because of affirmative action, there are endless examples in our public lexicon. We’re the good brown people, the ones you don’t need to be afraid of. In an attempt to keep our ears above racist waters, South Asians have sometimes associated with our own oppressors. That’s true of many minority groups, but when it is multiplied by the sometimes-unspoken requirements of marriage—very Tammy Wynette, very “Stand By Your Man”—it creates a vortex impossible to escape. If the woman in question even wants to escape.
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If Vance wanted to stand apart politically from her husband, she’s certainly free to do so. But the reality is that she doesn’t, and likely won’t. There’s no greater protection in the world than marriage to a white man with an education, money, and political power. Even as Vance herself is highly educated and well connected, it’s nothing compared to what her husband carries into the world. This is the kind of security women have sought for generations—in fact, for a long time, it was the only protection women could access. We are still in the relative infancy of women of color possessing the same rights as their white husbands. Asian American women like Vance didn’t fully gain access to the right to vote until the 1950s. Most states didn’t close their loopholes around spousal rape until the ’70s. Her marriage is the message, and it’s one she stands behind, even if she chooses to do so mostly silently.
There is no need to perform intellectual gymnastics to understand Vance’s positions. There’s no riddle to solve here. Vance is intelligent and educated and thoughtful; she knows who she married. We do too. She isn’t leaving him, because she doesn’t want to. She isn’t speaking out against his policies, because she’s not interested in doing so. She isn’t coming to save anyone. She isn’t a mystery. She’s just another woman married to a man, doing the job that a wife always does.