How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) is a satirical short story by Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience...

. The story takes the guise of an instructional manual, purporting to offer advice as to how to act or behave depending upon the ethnicity and social class of the reader’s date.

Plot Summary

Diaz’s dating guide for the Dominican American teenage male takes on the authority of experience by employing a narrator speaking in second person. The story is centered around a young teenage boy giving instructions about readiness for a date. Starting off with removing obvious signs of Dominican “ghetto” culture such as the "government cheese", then to approaching the female depending on whether or not she is an “insider” or “outsider”. As the story progresses you see how the narrators words and mannerisms change according to the race of the female. These observations determine his speech, dinner, physical approach to them. The narrator constantly shifts descriptions of both the women and the male's ethnicities and social class to where it is very difficult to determine exactly what type of person is speaking or to whom. However by the end of the short story one can identify with the struggle of this Dominican boy and the way he must manipulate himself in order to please the girls he is tending to.

Analysis

The narrator's style is said to "undercut both individuality and objectivity" by pointing out the different ways to court women or to hide your particular ethnicity. Diaz is not afraid to include small gestures that reveal cultural attitudes, even if these attitudes do not put Dominicans in the best light. When the narrator hide his origin when he gets rid of the Dominican “artifacts” in his apartment.He also recollect’s on his mother’s experiences of the tear gas from when the Americans invaded the “island”. He also recommends running a hand through your hair like “the white boys do”. Also stereotypical machismo can be seen through this piece as Diaz writes about the narrator’s attitude towards women. However overall, the narrator never allows for all the potential outcomes of the date to outstrip that there is a date to begin with.

As Diaz himself admits, much of his work is thinly veiled autobiography. His work is definitely fiction, however, and not to be seen as accurately portraying his own life. His life serves as literary inspiration, but he freely embellishes and changes characters, settings, and events. Díaz has commented on his story, saying "the issue is, is that these tendencies are deeply rooted in our community and that even though there's plenty of people who are not held by these tendencies, there's plenty of people who don't feel compelled to pursue these kind of craziness".

Character(s)

There is only one main character in this short story, however he is unnamed. The narrator is assumed to be a teenage boy living in an urban area. He is just trying to win the hearts of the ladies. However because of his upbringing and his culture he know he has to hide that in order to please a white girl or a halfie. You see the multiple dimensions of this one character all brought out by race.

Publication

How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) was first published in the December 1995 issue of the New Yorker

New Yorker

New Yorker may refer to:* A resident of New York City * A resident of New York state * The New Yorker, a magazine* A predecessor newspaper to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune...

. The short story was reprinted in the short story anthology Drown in 1996.