Stereotypes In 'How To Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl'

Daniel Dooner
Professor Hodges
ENWR 106-BD
2 February 2015
Essay 1 Draft 1 Views on Women through Inexperienced Eyes Dating a girl is not easy, especially during the years of junior high. For Yunior, the Protagonist in the story, How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie by Junot Diaz, dating women comes all too easy. Yunior uses a specific tool that helps him with ease, and that tool is called stereotyping. A stereotype is a widely held but very fixed image of a particular person or thing. Stereotyping these women to Yunior’s advantage may help him at the moment, but his young and inexperienced nature will hold no weight in the future when dealing with relationships in the future. Edgar Allen Poe, a widely known radical
He makes the reader connect with him through similar experiences they might have had in the past. However, he also makes the reader shun his concepts because he categorizes these women’s sexual openness by their ethnicity and race. Furthermore, Yunior permanently labels the girls he takes out. Stereotypes are a burden in itself, but every community is different, and that is where Yunior is at fault. Due to his young age, his character is very naïve. Not realizing that a woman’s sexual openness is not based off ethnicity, but instead, is based off emotion correlates with his young age. He does not understand the concept of loving a woman for more than her physical parts. He leads the reader to believe that he is just a person with testosterone flowing through his blood vessels, trying to find the quickest mate. Yunior also leads the reader to believe he is very young because the girl he ends up hanging out with knew a little bit of a different dialect. He stated that the girl would; “Pronounce with her eighth grade Spanish in your ear” (Diaz 100). This quote furthers the belief that Yunior is still very young because he is dating girls that are within the age group of fourteen to fifteen. Even if he was a couple years older, he still would not hold enough life experience to be able to explain in such crisp detail on how to date all these different
“Your neighbors will start their hyena calls, now that the alcohol is in them” (Diaz 100). This furthers the idea of living in poverty because all of his neighbors enjoy drinking alcohol. Along with the crime rate, and the poor living conditions he has to deal with on a daily basis, it is safe to assume that he lives in a poor waged neighborhood. In an article within The United States Library of Health and Medicine, the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies, New York Academy of Medicine conducted an experiment that lasted from 1985-2006 on the correlation between neighborhood poverty and alcohol consumption. They found out that over the span of almost two decades, higher alcohol consumption was recorded in poverty type neighborhood, compared to the counter part of normal blue collar living. Out of the 5115 Adults they interviewed, they found that there was an eighty six percent increase with binge drinking in a lower waged neighborhood. (www.ncbi.gov).These factors all indicate that Yunior lives in a neighborhood with lower income, thus stating that he does live in poverty. The reader finds out that the apartment building he lives in has outdated and smaller plumbing pipes. Yunior tells the reader this by describing his ritual when cleaning the bathroom for the women: “Put the basket with all the crapped-on toilet paper under the sink” (97). Although this may seem normal for Yunior, due to