Topic > Topic of Identity in How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, Halfie by Junot Diaz

In the short story How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, Halfie, there are many different forms of identity that can be drawn from story as a reader. This story is about a boy who is about to date a girl. In these short pages of the story, he describes a "dating manual" about the girl he is about to date. With each ethnicity he thinks the girl will be, he has a separate set of standards he should follow. It explains a different set of rules that must follow if the girl is brown, black, white, or half (mixed). Yunior, the boy protagonist of this story, lives in New Jersey in a low-income house. We know this because he explains how he has to hide his "government cheese" when the girl comes to his house. This shows us how he has to hide his true self to impress the girl he is about to win over. Yunior hides his true identity because he is afraid to show who he really is and doesn't want to seem like a loser in the eyes of the girl he dates. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In the short story, Yunior talks about a set of standards he must follow to please the girl he is going on a date with. At the beginning of this story, he talks about where he will have to hide the government cheese in his house when she comes to visit him. He explains how, depending on where it comes from, this will depend on where he hides it. Explain that if a girl belongs to a certain race, she should use certain etiquette on her date to please her. I feel like he's trying to change who he really is to make a girl happy. He's doing things he wouldn't normally do just to make the girl happy. He is changing his true self because he may be afraid of what the girl will think of him. For example, he says, “Remove the government cheese from the refrigerator.” If he wasn't afraid to show who he really was, he wouldn't have to worry about hiding it. I feel like he shouldn't care what she thinks of him and if she truly loved him, she wouldn't let his living situation bother her. In the story, I think readers can think about Yunior's identity from many different perspectives. History certainly tells us a lot about how we perceive others in our daily lives. In our world today, especially in this generation, we have many different stereotypes that we associate with different races and nationalities. We can also generalize stereotypes with different sexualities and age groups. These stereotypes, while not entirely accurate, stick with people, and when someone sees someone else who fits into a category, they tend to stereotype them based on things they hear about them or simply think about. This story is a perfect example of how we perceive others. When Yunior talked about the different actions he would take depending on the girl's race, he shows how we all sometimes use stereotypes in our daily lives to make decisions. Whether these decisions are big or small, they still play an important role in our lives. Another thing related to this tale is not just how we perceive others, but how we perceive ourselves. When Yunior talked about hiding his government cheese and photos of him with afro hair, he has some kind of insecurity about himself. We may perceive ourselves differently than others think of us. Even though Yunior was embarrassed about where he lived and the things he had in his house, it made him completely change the kind of person he was to a girl. If Yunior kept things in his house that made him feel uncomfortable having a girl around there, not.