Junot Diaz's How To Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl

Have you ever stopped and really thought about what kinds of bias people project onto a social group that you are a part of? The answer is most likely yes. However, have we truly seen a straight-forward and shameless point of view from someone who lays out all their different biases and stereotypes? In “How to date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” by Junot Diaz does exactly that. Yunior, our main character, is a Dominican teenage boy who lives in New Jersey. The story is almost an advice column about what to expect when dating a girl of a particular ethnicity and social class. Yunior describes his stereotypes of several different social groups as though they were the cold, hard truth. As if that’s not harmful enough, the biases are based on the few experiences that Yunior has with these different types of women.

In this story, each and every teenage boy, including Yunior, speaks with mainly derogatory terms when they talk to each other without the presence of any women. When one of Yunior’s friends asks Yunior if he’s “still waiting on that bitch,” Yunior says, “Hell yeah,” (Diaz 144). When these boys speak to each other, they only ever refer to the women in the story as “bitches” and “fuckbuddies,” (146). This essentially reduces the girls to objects, only worth what they can give with their bodies. They are not women with names or personalities, just “that bitch.” However, while these boys may be talking in such harmful terms to each other, they only do because of how they follow what other boys do to try and fit