In “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie,” Junot Diaz’s protagonist ironically uses the same oppression he has been subjected to, on the women he dates. In what I believe is a partly-autobiographical short story, Junot Diaz uses his experiences as a colored immigrant to write about marginalization and racism (the one he has interjected as the values and norms of his neighborhood), this time reflected towards the women he dates. His own victimization turns him, paradoxically, into a man that will use his gender privilege as a male, to use women to his advantage. This gender/racial dynamic allows him to act out, towards the women, the cycle of his own oppression as a Dominican immigrant.
As a Dominican born writer, Diaz’ experiences growing up in the U.S. are illuminating of a broader immigrant experience, one in which bilingualism and biculturalism play a prominent role in the fiction. In the words of one of his critics, Marisel Moreno, “[f]or a Dominican-American author such as Junot Diaz, writing constitutes an act of self-affirmation of his bicultural identity. His awareness of his ethnic minority condition, as I have suggested above, marks a change from previous Dominican literature in the United States.” [p.105, Moreno]
We will see, as the story unfolds, that Yunior, the protagonist, is drawing a sharp parallel between sexism and racism, and as he mocks the pervasiveness of stereotypes, he uses them to his advantage, to “empower” himself as a male, and to manipulate his own ethnic and social marginalization as a tool to take sexual advantage of women of all colors and ethnicities, and especially, to exert revenge of his own social oppression, on white women.
In this process, he will also become a perpetrator of racism while reproducing interjected racist values against himself, stating that the most desirable girls are white (“The white ones are the ones you want the most, aren’t they”, p. 145), confirming in this desire the negative views on the social value of his own skin: “Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own” (p. 147). This self deprecating comments make the story a very powerful one, one that shows Yunior’s racial and social marginalization, his contradictions (acting racist while having suffered racism himself) and at the same time, criticizing sexism and his own objectification of women in the story.
At first glance, one might be convinced that “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie” is mostly about addressing misogynistic ways in which young men think. While reading, one is prone to get distracted by Yunior’s continuous sexist comments that makes it easy to overlook the deeper meaning behind the point that Diaz is trying to show. Yunior, as the narrator addressing an imaginary “you” reader (another male, presumably, who will agree with Yunior’s comments and follow his instructions), uses humor and irony to create an image of detachment in his character. This personal detachment, expressed literarily in the use of the second person while imitating the rhetoric of an instruction’s manual, a “how to do it” book, allows him to objectify social, gender and racial relationships, and to speak of them as if they were steps to follow in an instructions manual for living–and dating– in a socially unequal and racially codified society, such as the one he describes in his book, Drown.
It also addresses the social and financial precariousness of Dominican immigrants, such as himself: “Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girl’s from the Terrace stack the boxes behind the milk. If she’s from the Park or Society Hill hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, way up where she’ll never see”. (p. 143) Self-deprecating humor helps him cope with his own marginalization, making it imperative (the first step in the instructions after “Wait for your brother and your mother to leave the apartment”, p. 143), to hide the family’s financial need in the form of government’s help. His embarrassment is justified by his goal– the ultimate success of his conquests. He needs to hide his family’s financial reality because being poor and ashamed of it doesn’t fit the role of the successful immigrant and/or the picture of the cool, suave latino guy who attracts all sorts of racially diverse girls.
The background of poverty and social marginalization that Diaz describes in the story give context to the struggles of Dominican immigrants to the U.S. It also adds many layers of subtleties in terms of the complex relationships between the marginal groups that live in the fictional “Terrace” (a metaphor of an urban/suburban place where minorities live–“people get stabbed in the Terrace”, p.144), Yunior’s neighborhood, especially between Dominicans, Puerto Ricans (–a more established immigrant group–, “Hope that you don’t run into your nemesis, Howie, the Puerto Rican kid, with the two killer mutts.” p. 146) and Blacks (“Black people, she will say, treat me real bad. That’s why I don’t like them. You’ll wonder how she feels about Dominicans”, p.147). Yunior’s comments seem to fill his nervous head while thinking of the best strategy to conduct the date, but they provide context and vulnerability to the character. What initially appears as a story about an immature, self-absorbed, young Dominican boy trying to have sexual interactions with girls of different races– reaches deeper meaning as we listen to his comments. Diaz uses the machismo embedded and distilled in the male narrator’s view of everything as a way to showcase how truly vulnerable and self conscious he is (“Dinner will be tense. You are not good at talking to people you don’t know.” p. 146). When looking at the bigger picture, Diaz is not only addressing sexism as a problem that women face, he also shows the other side of machismo, the one that brings out to the surface men’s incapacity to face exposure and vulnerability, which is not often noted.
It’s crucial to note that in order for us to feel both sympathy and contempt for Yunior’s sexism and objectification of women, Diaz is able to use a wide variety of literary strategies, such as evoking different date scenarios with very specific details and outcomes depending on the race of the girl:
A local girl may have hips and thick ass but she won’t be quick about letting you touch. She has to live in the same neighborhood you do, has to deal with you being all up in her business. She might just chill with you and then go home. She might kiss you and then go, or she might, if she’s reckless, give it up, but that’s rare. Kissing will suffice. A whitegirl might just give it up right then. Don’t stop her. She’ll take her gum out of her mouth, stick it to the plastic sofa covers and then will move close to you. You have nice eyes, she might say. (p. 147).
Each description is a mini-social vignette that represents racial and gender dynamics that bring out to the open prejudices and stereotypes under the light of the vulnerabilities and insecurities of a socially disadvantaged bilingual, biracial, Dominican male. In fact, his insecurities as a Dominican man lay mostly on what racism tells him he is not (a white male), and that feeling of not belonging is at the center of his low self-esteem: “Run a hand through your hair like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa. White girls are the ones you want most, aren’t they? If she’s a halfie don’t be surprised that her mother is the white one. If the girl’s from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. If she’s not, Wendy’s will do.” (p. 145). In this quote, Yunior knows the gestures that accompany self-assuredness in males, but when he reproduces them, his “african hair” gets on the way to remind him of his own racial complexities: neither black nor white, he is the Dominican Other that problematizes racial and ethnic categorizations in the land of immigration. There is also the suggestion that “white males” do not date “colored girls”: “If she’s a halfie don’t be surprised that her mother is the white one”, devaluing with this racist comment not only his own skin color, but women of all colors, by suggesting that white males are the only ones who really choose. More into the story, we will see that women have agency only insofar as they can choose if they “give it up” (and they do only if they are “reckless”, p. 147), exposing the all too familiar double standard of sexuality between the genres: ultimately, Yunior, like white and black and latino males, will despise women who choose to “give it up”, although that is his open–and only– goal in the story.
To complicate further things, in this quote we also see how the social status of each girl makes her (or not) deserving of different places for dinner. If the girl is “foreign” to the neighborhood, an “exotic” place will impress her (“Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if she’s Latina and amaze her if she’s black.” p. 145) If she is a “local”, there is no need to impress her, so a local fast-food chain (“Wendy’s”) will do. Marisel Moreno notes in her article: “The potential conquest of the “browngirl,” the “blackgirl,” the “whitegirl,” and the “halfie,” is determined in every case by the experiential proximity (i.e. familiarity) or distance of each girl to the Terrace and what it represents”. (Moreno, p. 108).
To add yet another element of intersectionality in the quote above, even Yunior’s lack of proficiency in Spanish is both exposed and reclaimed as a piece of foreignness to his own Dominican origin, and places him in a no-man’s linguistic land. In this sense, Yunior mirrors a biographical extension of writer Junot Diaz, who chooses the following quote (by Cuban writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat) for his book, Drown:
The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else
According to Marisel Moreno, this assimilation to American culture (and language) places Junot Diaz in the new generation of Dominican-Latino writers:
Dominican-born Diaz and New York born Alvarez, both fall into this category because they spent most of their formative years in the United States and were raised in bicultural environments. Although their styles and concerns are quite different, Diaz and Alvarez have made their biculturalism a central topic in their works and have used English as their primary vehicle of expression. In doing so, they have broken away from the predominantly nostalgic, insular-oriented, and Spanish-language literary tradition of Dominicans in the diaspora[…] (p. 104).
As we can see, Yunior’s life is fragmented and marked not only by the immigrant, bilingual and bicultural experience, but his racism and sexism is also shaped through the lens of American unspoken prejudices (of gender, races and social class) that break away with the myth that people of all races and colors are equal and that they thrive in the new land of opportunity. To add to this discussion, Marisel Moreno says: “Dominicans simultaneously struggle to integrate and to protect their distinctive cultural identities, they have been forced to question static notions of being Dominican (racial, ethnic, class, gender linguistic and cultural) that originate at home and that have prevailed in the diaspora.” (Moreno, p. 105).
To view male’s objectification of women through the (dark) eyes of a socially disadvantaged and self conscious, immature boy, highlights the parallels of sexism and racism. Yunior uses his vulnerabilities and “exotic” immigrant background as a way to empower himself and “get” the girls (even if it is only a fantasy in his mind), and Diaz is able to manipulate these racist, stereotypical comments into a way of making a criticism of sexism and racism through a parody of the social life of the protagonist and his struggle to assimilate culturally to the US, to live within the financial constraints of his family’s immigrant precarious situation, and to challenge “official” racial categorizations while making them meaningful only in order to fulfill the stereotypes.
In terms of the style of the story, as I mentioned before, one of the first things we question as readers is the choice of describing Yunior as an arrogant, self-absorbed, sexist, and racist light. Why does Diaz do this? Why does he make the protagonist–initially– so hard to like? I believe that Diaz is trying to make this boy relatable to how many young brown boys living in the United States feel. Very soon in the short story we see Yunior’s “soft spots”: his hiding of childhood family pictures (along with the “government’s cheese”): “Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially the one with the half-naked kids dragging a goat on a rope leash” (p. 143); his insecurities about being perceived as an “idiot”: “The directions were in your best handwriting, so her parents don’t think you’re an idiot.” (p. 144); his fear of being perceived dangerous or scary by her Date’s Mom: “Say Hi. Her mom will say hi and you’ll see that you don’t scare her, not really. She will say that she needs easier directions to get out and even though she has the best directions in her lap give her new ones. Make her happy.” (p. 145). These quotes constitute the foundation of Diaz’s point, to show how immigrants and people of color (especially boys) have to live under an umbrella of suspicion and doubt, and to show that they perceive themselves as “flawed”, as having to apologize and justify aspects of their lives when they shouldn’t have to; it also exposes how they have to appear more self assured than what they really are, as part of machista culture, but also as a result of their vulnerability and exposure to prejudice and racism. The context of vulnerability and openness that accompanies Yunior’s racist and sexist comments, are there to create empathy towards the character and to drive the higher point that both racism and sexism are present in the story because that is the world that has shaped Yunior, and we cannot understand one without the other. When Yunior details and exposes stereotypes and racism against women and against himself, we, as readers, understand the destructiveness of both patterns.
The key to Yunior’s vulnerability and of our understanding of it, lies in the brilliant use of the second person in the story, the male “you” to whom the narrator dictates instructions. This use of the second person works as a “doubling” of Yunior himself. At the end of the story we don’t know whether the dates are real or imaginary, but we know that we have been listening to Yunior talk to himself in an effort to acquire some control in this highly racialized, socially and gender codified world: “You’ll be with her until about eight-thirty, and then she’ll want to wash up. After she leaves the phone will ring. Don’t answer it. Don’t fall asleep. Put the government cheese back in its place before your moms kills you.” (p. 149) In the end, we don’t know whether the dates really happen, or if it is only a fantasy in his head; we do know, however, that Yunior is lonelier than ever, and that his encounter with girls, as a result of sexism and racism, even if they bring him sexual pleasure, do not bring communication, solidarity, friendship or love.