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Yunior's How To Date A Brown Girl, Black Girl

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Yunior from Junot Diaz’s short story, “How to Date A Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie”, acts as his own worst enemy because his interactions with the opposite sex in his neighborhood prevent him from establishing more meaningful connections. Essentially, Yunior is sexually motivated because he views sex as a game; the more girls he has sex with, the more valuable he is to the men in his neighborhood. In Yunior's case, the amount of sex he has is reflective of his masculinity and value as a man. Yunior believes that being promiscuous satisfies his idea of what it means to be a man, and his sexual conquests serve as a type of competition with the other men in his neighborhood. Subsequently, this prevents Yunior from developing a sense of respect for the girls he encounters, and only furthers his belief that women are sex objects. The more sexual interactions Yunior has, the stronger his disposable attitude towards women grows. Yunior serves as his own antagonist when it comes to sex and relationships because his desire for connection backfires amidst his sexual conquests. Yunior's perception of women as objects prevents …show more content…

Yunior organizes the women he brings over into a hierarchy based on race, with white girls situated near the top. Yunior specifically values white girls over other races because they help him live vicariously through their whiteness, or at least draw him nearer to their whiteness by association. Once again, Yunior hides the pictures of himself with an afro because he is ashamed of his blackness, and does not want the girls he brings over to know his African heritage. Yunior seems to associate whiteness with wealth and privilege; he even states that he wishes his skin, hair, and lips were more like a white person’s. Yunior prefers white girls because they remind himself of what he wants to be: Yunior wishes he were white, and not black or

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Junot Diaz’s short story, “How to date a Brown girl, Black girl, White girl, or Halfie,” unmasks different views that a one might portray about a certain type of race or skin color. Diaz creates an instruction manual/ book that shows certain and different ways on how to date a girl based on the color of their skin and appearances. The text in the short story shows the reader how to act and behave determined on who they are and making contact with someone of a different ethnicity. Certain people are placing roadblocks on a woman because of her class, race, and religion. In Diaz’s shirt story text there are a ton of issues that play a part, for example

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Native American literature and Latin American literature are like two pieces of the same pie, they may be different in appearance, but deep down, they share similar roots and characteristics. Both Junot Diaz and Sherman Alexie come from a modest minority family but have used their intelligence and knack for writing to make it and live a life in the United States, thriving. “How to Date a Browngirl,” by Junot Diaz is told in second person point of view, as a list for the reader on how to handle a date with a girl. The speaker provides many tips and steps on how to have a good time and look good for a girl as the story progresses. In “How to Fight Monsters,” by Sherman Alexie, Junior faces a whole different set of problems, instead of having

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In the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the Dominican culture is told through a stereotypical Dominican named Yunior. As stated in the title, the novel discusses Oscar Wao’s brief life through his family’s curse called Fukú. The history of his family is presented through their downfalls in love, which overtime accumulates into a burden for Oscar to experience the same events his family members had once experienced. This Fukú that has been lurking within the Cabral family’s history from the Dominican Republic to the United States is commonly found through dysfunctional relationships between men and women. The known concept in relationships called love transforms into a corrupted power source for abuse based on the

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In Dominican and almost every culture today, relationships are a thing of the past. Woman are viewed as commodities, but Oscar does not view them this way and for this and other reasons he struggles. At seven years old Oscar is described to be chasing all of the girls around. This act of chasing girls and having multiple girls to cling to was accepted in Oscar’s family. In fact, his family actually encouraged the behavior.

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In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the reader follows the story of Oscar de Leon as told by his college roommate, Yunior. Although the novel is named after Oscar and depicts his life, the information given tells more about Yunior than Oscar. In many ways, however, Oscar serves as a foil to Yunior, showing the hardships of achieving masculinity in Dominican culture. While, to the public, Yunior is the typical masculine, sexually-driven posterchild of Dominican culture, so much of him is shaped by his relationship with Oscar. In some aspects, Oscar was able to mirror Yunior’s struggles, especially when it came to girls and masculinity, but he is also able to illuminate how hard Yunior struggled to fit in by being more true

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Not only does Diaz write novels and short stories, but he also takes action towards exposing the problems that Dominican people especially women face everyday. There might be some people who consider Diaz to be an Antifeminist and also a disgrace to his country, the Dominican Republic, but the only thing that Diaz is doing with his writing is exposing the reality of what its meant to be an immigrate from another country and how machismo affects Feminism in Latin cultures. Diaz shows his feminism by exposing machismo and what women in Latin cultures deal with everyday. Machismo is a term used to describe the dominant male behavior in Latin cultures. Machismo can also be describe as a man objectifying a women as a

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Oscar is an awkward overweight nerd while Yunior was an athlete who could bench 340 pounds. There values were also completely opposite. Oscar is a romantic, caring, faithful, and respectful. Yunior is the stereotypical type of a man that is masculine with no care for anything, a cheater, and no value or sympathy in things. Despite all these differences they became best friends.

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In “No Face”, Ysrael narrates the same events instead of Yunior. Although these two short stories do not directly feature Yunior and Rafa’s father, they are as much about Yunior’s growth and development during his father’s absence as they are about Ysrael. In “Situating Latin American Masculinity: Immigration, Empathy and Emasculation in Junot Diaz’s Drown”, John Riofrio emphasizes that “Ysrael sets the stage for the picture of masculinity which will reveal itself throughout all ten of the stories.” At this point in time, Yunior is only a nine year old boy in the Dominican Republic, at a point in life where he is on

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The character Yunior, being the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is all in good reason being he is the standing of true Dominican male. Yunior emulates the Dominican American stereotypes of masculinity. Stereotyped that a man must be dominate, powerful, and with a attractive physic, Dominicans are expected to come with a violent nature and through physical violence and verbal aggression, act on an increased sexual drive without that masculine persona and things Oscars has a hard time crossing into those steps of manhood. From jump, it seems like Oscar in relation to the title isn’t the outsider and portrayed to enhance an image of the narrator in the mind of the reader. Then through a break down argument it became clear

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Class and gender/sexuality are complicated in “Drown” by Junot Díaz. Yunior and Beto are ex-best friends who are separated through the complications. Their relationship tenses up when Beto decides to better his life through education. At first glimpse, Yunior’s struggle with class and sexuality could be based within his homophobic fear. The typical understanding that Yunior’s unmotivated attitude stems from fear is flawed because it fails to recognize his stance to not change who he believes he is and where he is meant to be.

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The preconceived ideas within social classes and races predetermines what people think of others. After reading the story we can draw the conclusion about the dateable young girls and advises the reader to take advantage of the limited knowledge of the girls leading to sexual relations. Although to cover the authors tracks at the end of the publication, Diaz begins to use an educative tone to issue a warning that his advice may not always work and to not follow the rules

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Deviating from this expectation was met with ridicule. The sexual lives of young women are strongly monitored; Esther is not solely outside the viewpoint. She has a low regard for sex, also she is unsure she wants to get married. In the realization of Buddy sexual history, Esther is mortified, the image of the Buddy she had in her mind was completely different from the reality. Nevertheless, his confession has one benefit for Esther; she is freed from the social norms that are placed on young women at the College, dating compulsion.

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Because Frado is of mixed race, she experiences an even worse sort of degradation than she would have if both of her parents had been black, a situation which leads to her position as a societal outcast. For example, Mrs. Bellmont’s hatred for Frado and the strength of her cruelty progressively increase throughout the story in part because Frado “was not many shades darker than Mary now,” suggesting that Mrs. Bellmont fears the power that black people could gain if they were treated as equals to whites in the North (Wilson 39). For example, Mrs. Bellmont forbids Frado from sheltering her skin from the sun in an attempt to make Frado darker. She fears that her peers will notice that Frado is not much darker than Mary: “what a calamity it would be to ever hear that contrast spoken of.... Mrs. Bellmont was determined the sun should have full power to darken the shade which nature had first bestowed on her as best fitting”

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This implies regardless of the person Yunior is with, he always tries to change a small aspect of himself and never truly shows who he is. Diaz, uses listing to further the idea of Yunior changing parts of him slightly to be perceived differently. Yunior provides a set of expectations a male must meet in order to win over the girl they are on a date with. This listing is known as the “Dating Handbook”.

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The article Navigating Interracial Borders: Black- White Couples and Their Social Worlds explores the place of Interracial couples in a racialized world with rigid racial borders. As well as research the different ways in which white communities and black communities feel about and respond to interracial dating and marriage. The author argues that Interracial relationship helps to reveal underlying racial problems in society, that otherwise wouldn’t be known, especially to white people. She compares Black-White couples to a “Miner’s Canary,” based on this idea.

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