Race is clearly not universal. Many new
immigrant groups bring new forms of viewing ethnic groups with them: the mung
of Vietnam, the paisas of Colombia, and the garifuna of Honduras. Junot Diaz in
his short story “How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie)”
reveals a new vision of ethnicity via a pidgin language spoken amongst his peers
in the north eastern United States. A mix of Dominican Spanish, AAVE, and
Standard English are used by the speaker in order to recreate a Dominican
version of race.
While some other racial categories have existed,
the English system of ethnic categorization was a dichotomy: white and black.
As such, African-American literature has long polemicized the role of the “multatto”[1].
We find this nominalist issue in Diaz’s depiction of race. As the title reveals
there are both white and black “girls”; however, there are others that do not
fit the speaker’s Dominican more complex understanding of race. In the Dominican
Republic in fact several racial categories exist, beyond the dichotomous “black-white”
of the United States (Candelario).
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