Bargain Basement Woke - Dressing Oppressed As The New Yale High Fashion

Jose Salas, Joe Rooms as he was known at Yale, came up the hard way - mixed race Latino parents with a Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican scrabble of intermarriages and first cousins, field hands, grape-pickers, and downstairs maids, all in the United States after trouble with the law, some variety of trafficking, and a simple boat passage across the Caribbean. 

Jose was a good boy, a bit ashamed of his family's ticky-tacky past, and resented his father who smoked cigars on the broken porch boards of their tarpaper shack instead of hustling the American way, and his mother who got fat and lazy on triple helpings of rice and beans, never once cooked him and his sisters a proper meal, and went off for days into Tampa and came back rumpled but with a new dress every time. 

Jose was a good student, prompted by a desire to become American, studied hard, minded his P's and Q's, and managed to get a scholarship to Yale - one of the first affirmative action babies to matriculate in New Haven, but a fish out of water in a university still filled with Old Guard legacy boys, sons of Boston, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard scions of English heritage.  

He was found by Father Adalberto Sanchez Castro, a distant relative of the famous Cuban family who fled the island after Fidel's murderous revolution, enrolled in the seminary, and became the first of his generation to have a vocation.  Father Castro took a shine to the young Salas boy - a distinctly sexual interest it must be noted, for even amongst Latino Catholic clergy and despite the prevailing macho culture of the islands, he had a fondness of young boys. Thanks to his solicitude and young Jose's complaisance, the right levers were pulled, and the priest secured a spot for him Yale Class of 19__.

Now, it must be said that Jose was no slouch, did his homework, and passed his classes with fair to middlin marks - all thanks to a faculty which had been told that these 'different' boys should be passed without hesitation.  'They have suffered enough', said the Dean of Students, 'without the opprobrium of failing grades'.

'Where should I go?', Jose asked himself once he found himself on the Old Campus, for these were the early days of race-gender-ethnicity, and he was encouraged by his academic mentor and affirmative action counselor to join one of the new Hispanic American groups at Yale. 'These are your people, Jose', the counselor said. 'It is where you belong'.

And so it was that Yale did its part to sideline the boy's intention to shuck all that Latino baggage - the stink of cheap cigars, the sickening slop of three meals a day rice and beans, the cheap whores, and total social indifference of his family - and become just as American as his classmates who had three homes and summered in  St. Tropez. 

Instead of the smooth elision from burritos to Wedgewood that he had hoped for and expected out of Yale, he was loose-shunted into a car barn that smelled of the tobacco that his uncles rolled for two dollars an hour.  'Tampa North' was one such Hispanic group, but given that Yale was only at the beginning of its progressive transformation, there were only a few Latinos in the group - a nondescript clutch of Mexicans who had, like him, been found by local patrons who, for a few favors, called in a few of their own, and got their charges into Yale. 

Now, it wasn't long before the Latinos discovered their privileged status at the university.  They were the counter elite, the balance for the wealthy sons of New England, who were treated specially.  In their case it was given a free pass to do whatever, just be there to be counted when it was Yale's turn to account for diversity. 

 

As strongly determined as Jose was, he couldn't resist the pressure to conform and the free and easy lifestyle that affirmative action afforded.  He and his Latino mates became virtual avatars of their parents.  'Tampa North' was an apt and timely name for the group. 

By the end of four years, Jose had grown out his Afro, dressed in serapes and ponchos - whatever Hispanic garb was available - and marched for equity, identity, and respect.  Yale had converted him from an up and coming American to an identity-swaddled 'person of color'. 

From graduation on he became a progressive's progressive, always at the forefront of what had become the diversity movement, and like all good liberals of the time conflated his Hispanic activism to all color-based protests. He allied himself with every oppressed group so defined by the movement, and became an outspoken champion of the socially disadvantaged.  He lost whatever trace of objectivity and Kantian rationalism that Yale had offered, and became a soldier of color and color only.

Along the way he married Adalina Rodriguez, a homely, scratchy girl from Radcliffe who like him had sailed in and out on her university's largesse and guilt-ridden social consciousness.  Jose would have much preferred Sandra Potter, a blonde, blue-eyed girl from Wellesley, daughter of the colonial Potters, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and one of the oldest families in America; but he tamped down the desire, so committed was he to oppression, identity, and color, and went off with Adalina.  

 

The couple settled down in Washington where he secured a job with the government in one of its new Equal Opportunity offices - a no-show job, basically, designed in principle to be the watchdog for inclusivity and racial balance, but remained in principle only since few corporations wanted to be hamstrung by some liberal cant and self-righteousness.

By the time he was middle-aged, and thanks to his government service, a member of the boards of a number of high profile Fortune 500 companies who had capitulated to government pressure and had established aggressive DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity) departments, racial progressivism defined him. He had willingly discarded any other sense of Americanism, intellectual independence, or in fact moral integrity.  Anyone who confirmed the sanctity of DEI and concern for the oppressed was his friend and colleague; and anyone who did not was cancelled, erased, removed from his phone book. 

Always of friendly demeanor and a bonhomie which was part of the job - people of color had to show the rest of the country that they were just like normal Americans, and their current demands for special attention were just temporary - beneath the surface Jose was a censorious, revisionist bully.  Somehow, despite bright beginnings, he had become a narrowminded tool of a noxious movement.  

His scratchy, wiry wife was no different - worse in fact because she added gender to the people of color mix.  White Americans were oppressing her not only because of her racial-ethnic diversity but because she was a woman.  Adaline became a harridan, a political succubus that Jose could only admire from afar; but the two of them were the couple always seen at the barricades, and on the front lines of democratic progressive reform. 

Jose cancelled people left and right and found himself within a narrow circle of like-minded progressives.  Their hatred for Donald Trump was visceral, and their scorn for any one with even the most temperate conservative views palpable.  They were ensconced in a bitter, nasty, group which had no patience or tolerance for anyone outside of it. 

 

'Bargain basement woke', said a former Yale classmate who remembered Joe Rooms and his rancid screeds in front of Harkness Tower; but it just goes to show you.  Not only had the old patrician ways of honor, discipline, and respect gone out the window, but Yale had become the inverse - itself a rancidly, objectionable bottom-feeder.  All of its historical eminence, pride in the best and the brightest, had been exchanged for social irrelevance, espousal of a cause which would go as quickly as it came.  A shameful display of weak academic complaisance. 

'Dressing oppressed', he concluded.