Slate writer is confounded that JD Vance's wife, Usha, doesn't divorce him.

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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?”

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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 Ainsley Earhardt 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.

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