Mr. and Mrs. White: Outmarriage and Political Persona for Conservative Asian American Women

Republican congresswoman Michelle Steel, California state senator Janet Nguyen, far-right political commentator Michelle Malkin, Trump-era Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley all have two things in common. They're all Asian American women active in conservative politics, and they're all married to white men. A weird pattern, but let's be clear: there are plenty of conservative Asian American women who aren't married to white men, and outmarriage to white partners is common for Asian American women in general, regardless of political orientation. Moreover, any outside analysis of an individual's partner choice will ultimately devolve into conjecture. Rather than try to speculate on why these women all have white partners (as the answer is likely just that they're in love), it's more fruitful to examine the meanings their white partnerships may create for their predominantly white conservative constituencies. Being married to a white partner affects political persona, just as being in a same-sex marriage, being married multiple times, or being married to a convicted felon or veteran do. What messages about Asian Americans are being drawn upon or conveyed? Why do white partners, as I will argue, provide Asian American women alignment with politically conservative ideas rather than incongruity with them?

Like many facets of Asian American life, conservative women's construction of their political personas through outmarriage is steeped in the twin stereotypes of perpetual foreignness and model minority status. Perpetual foreignness, the belief that Asian Americans have inherent ties to their ancestral homelands regardless of their cultural assimilation or generational status, is what led Republican congressman Lance Gooden to question the "loyalty" of California-born-and-raised representative Judy Chu, motivated the wrongful and overturned espionage arrests of naturalized U.S. citizen scientists Sherry Chen, Xiaoxing Xi, and Gang Chen, and causes British actress Kate Winslet to be perceived as more American than New York native Lucy Liu. With immigration and national security emerging as top political priorities for the GOP, not to mention the rabid nativist and anti-China rhetoric of former president Donald Trump, conservative Asian American women in particular stand to gain by trading in ethnic maiden names and presenting "all-American" (note the narrow and racialized definition of American) lifestyles and families to suspicious and xenophobic constituents. Grounding their family lives in white America commits them to the U.S. and assuages concerns of ulterior loyalties — having "American" partners and children gives Asian women a meaningful stake in the U.S. and lessens the possibility of them "defecting" to their ancestral homelands the way they are innately inclined to under the perpetual foreigner stereotype. Additionally, outmarriage may allow a conservative Asian American woman to tap into the sense of trust and kinship white voters feel toward her white partner to further tamp down on suspicions: though she may never be a "real" American in their eyes, she has at least been vetted and vouched for by one of their own.

While outmarriage might be a means to escape the perpetual foreigner stereotype, the model minority myth — the pedestaling of Asian Americans as successful, hardworking, and deeply law-abiding — can serve as a compelling component of Asian Americans' political personas. For white-partnered Asian American women, their marriages are an implicit way to tell this story: Asian women's intermarriage with white partners correlates with higher levels of education and income, the foundations of the stereotype. By leaning into the model minority myth, one can appeal to conservative audiences from two angles. First, for assimilationist white conservatives, the model minority myth signals distance from Blackness and comfort with the white-dominant racial status quo. It's a key contributor to the Asian "honorary white" status that has been detailed in sociological theory and demonstrated in popular thought, with the majority of white Americans (diverging from all other groups) seeing Asian Americans as being more similar to white people than to other racialized people. For a broader audience, political figures can tap into the myth's decades-long love affair with conservatism. Race scholar Ellen D. Wu traces the myth's origins beyond its oft-cited 1966 christening to a 1950s fixation on the nuclear family (associated with Chinese households on account of "Confucian values") and a Cold War-era anticommunism that pitted industrious, economically-mobile Chinese Americans against their peers abroad. The latter of these associations was only strengthened by later waves of Vietnamese refugees that, in tandem with high levels of Asian immigrant small business ownership, cemented Asian Americans as believable and embraceable members of conservative America.

For white-partnered Asian American women specifically, the messaging goes even deeper. Some of the earliest white-partnered Asian women in the country entered as wives of WWII servicemen upon the 1945 passing of the War Brides Act, and Asian wives of non-Asian servicemen made up sizable portions (and in some cases the majority) of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino immigration in the 50s and early 60s. These widespread early images of white-Asian partnerships normalized and deradicalized interracial intimacy by placing it in the controlled context of American military dominance and white male hegemony. The war bride phenomenon, along with the model minority myth, established a perception of Asian American women as "safe" and "acceptable" partners for white men that informs dating choice even in the modern day. For conservative constituencies with latent discomfort with intermarriage, Asian woman-white man partnerships may not be perceived as threatening or even racialized the way other forms of intermarriage, particularly ones involving white women or Black people, could be.

The deracialization white partnership offers to Asian American women is powerful because it facilitates racial colorblindness ideology, a core tenet of Asian American and other minority neoconservatism and a fan favorite of white conservative audiences with a distaste for "identity politics" and "making everything about race." For Asian women, having a non-Asian spouse correlates with lower levels of ethnic group identification and a higher likelihood of identifying as "American" over ethnic American labels like "Korean American." By distancing themselves from ethnic identity, denying ongoing systemic racism, lionizing "merit," and professing racial colorblindness (which is actually just white assimilationism), conservative Asian Americans ensure distinction from other racialized people deemed to be political radicals and racial dissidents. The racial worldview Asian American neoconservatives present — where racism has been legislated away, outcome differences are due to "cultural" factors rather than structural ones, success is owed to objectively-measurable merit, and their race doesn't matter (because sufficient proximity to whiteness has been reached) — appeals to white conservatives because it does not challenge them to examine or shift their behaviors or attitudes.

Ultimately, regardless of the relationship's sincerity, white partnerships play a role in painting conservative Asian American women as the kind of political figure — and the kind of Asian — conservative supporters want to see. She is assimilated, indubitably loyal, and has renounced foreign ties like a family name or strong ethnic identification. She is educated, high-earning, grateful, and deeply supportive of the establishment, a model minority and a testament to the benefit America provides to immigrant populations. Most of all, she, like her white peers and partner, holds a deracialized status and is comfortable with the racial status quo. Her white-adjacent position near the top of the racial order discourages her engagement in panethnic solidarity and action. It ensures the perpetuation of white supremacy and cements her as a willing guardian of the system — a conservative in every sense of the word.