Critical Essay on Junot Diaz’s Short Story ‘How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl or a Halfie)’ – Free Essay Example

In the story ‘How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl or a Halfie)’, Diaz’s statement about perceived identity is hiding one’s true self from society. The narrator suggests hiding his activities’ true self from his family and his date in the story. When he says to put the cheese back into the fridge after the date is over. It shows that he returns to his true self after the date is over. He also suggests acting differently towards a girl depending on her background. Junot Diaz uses a boy as the main character to talk about stereotypes and demonstrates how he dates and treats women based on their race.

Junot Diaz’s guide to dating for the American Dominican teenager uses the experience using a second-person narrator. The story revolves around a young teenager who gives guidance on dating readiness. It eliminates the obvious hallmarks of Dominican ‘ghetto’ culture, such as the ‘government cheese’.

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The narrator’s style is said to undercut both individuality and objectivity, pointing out the different ways to court women or hide particular ethnicity. However, the narrator never allows for all the date’s potential outcomes to outstrip a date, to begin with. There are many different images of the way these kinds of women are. For example, it seems like the author tends to make white women somewhat slutty when the author stated, “If she’s a white girl, you know you’ll at least get a hand job”. This quote is telling the reader that white women could be easily taken advantage of. When the narrator talks about the other kinds of women, he talks about being kind and impressive. “Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if she’s Latina and amaze her if she’s black”. The narrator seems to treat the women differently based on the date they will go on. “If the girl’s from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. If she’s not from around the way, Wendy’s will do”. The narrator seems to change how he treats girls based on their skin color and their origins.

Junot Diaz’s statement in ‘How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl or a Halfie)’ is ironic because you can easily pretend to be someone else that you are not and win people’s hearts, but, in reality, it’s a bad act as you will lose people because you are not even true to yourself and them; it only brings harm to you because people want to see your true self. Being yourself is important because you will not be happy otherwise.