Lessons from the Alpha Male:
“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” by Junot Diaz Every red-blooded American male reaches a zenith in his life when he has finally joined the company of men, and been deemed worthy to receive a lifetime of collected wisdom and tutelage from his elder “packmates”. This knowledge comes in both lewd and often brutally honest sentiments that can induce feelings of excitement and unabashed shame, but regardless of the emotions evoked, it is a necessary rite of passage signifying a young man’s entrance into the world of his peers. This transformation and the hesitance involved is masterfully scripted in Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie”. The dialogue
Regardless of the young man’s desires, the narrator seems determined to impart his wisdom of dating girls of different ethnicities:
If the girl's from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if she's Latina and amaze her if she's black. If she's not from around the way, Wendy's will do (256).
This may be indicative of the narrator’s experience with white women not choosing to socialize with men of his ilk and struggling to make the young man realize that he needs to keep his options open. Finally, the young man is coached on the intricacies of being intimate with women of various ethnicities. The details are far from sensitive, but presented with the cavalier attitude of a young man not made wiser with age. The narrator even begins to instruct the young man on conversation specifically geared to coerce a young woman into being agreeable to sex. The young man learns how to respond to a woman’s comments to “sound smooth”(257) and what he needs to expect after he has “been with her” (257). He is made aware that any friendship that the man previously had with the woman will never be the same and that “You will not know what to say” (257). Diaz paints a painful, almost remorseful, image of a woman who has just done something she knows she will later regret, but this remorse seems to not be exclusive to just one race but shared by all of them. While the narration up until this