Alex Wagner Says J.D. Vance Wanting Family to Get Buried in Ancestral Plot Is ‘White Male Lineage’ Determining Family History

TRANSCRIPT:

WAGNER: "Kentucky, where his seven — or six generations of his family are buried, and his hope is that his wife and he eventually are laid to rest there and their kids follow them. And I sort of understand the idea of sharing the burial plot, but it also is — it reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit, and indeed, the history that should be determinative in the — in the story of the Vance family is that the history of the eastern Kentucky Vances and not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and where her Indian parents are from. But in America, it doesn’t always have to be the white male lineage that trumps -- that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else. And I just think the construction of of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity, and it’s couched in a sort of halcyon re-visitation of his roots, but it is actually really revealing about what he thinks matters and who America is."