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…
Read More: How her marriage to J.D. Vance explains everything.
