Junot Diaz How To Date Analysis

Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” lays out a list of dating instructions for young men. The story is written as a second person narrative directed at both the main character Yunior, as well as the reader. The first instruction is to wait for your mother and brother to leave the apartment after telling them a lie, that you are feeling sick and cannot go with them to visit your aunt. The second paragraph says to “clear the government cheese from the refrigerator,” to hide the fact that you are of low economic status. You must also take down any embarrassing photos that indicate your Dominican heritage. The narrator continues with guidelines that vary depending on whether or not the girl you want to date is an “insider or an outsider” to “the Terrace,” a poor area in which the narrator lives. These instructions consist of racial stereotypes and the hiding of one's true identity in order …show more content…
In “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” Diaz makes it clear that the narrator, or himself as a boy, is ashamed of his socioeconomic status and his race when he hides the government cheese and pictures of his family. He plans to run his fingers through his hair “like a white-boy” and, if he gets with a white girl he plans to tell her that he love’s her hair, skin, and lips, because, “in truth, he loves them more than he loves his own.” If the girl is an outsider he says to tell her stories about the neighborhood, like the one about, “the loco who’d been storing canisters of tear gas in his basement for years, how one day the canisters cracked and the whole neighborhood got a dose of the military-strength stuff.” However, he says not tell her that his mother recognized the smell, “from the year the United States invaded your island.” Yunior does not want his date to know that his mother and himself are