Stereotyping In Junot Diaz's Persuasion

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Persuasion can be used in a good way as well as in a bad way. In the short story “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)”, Junot Diaz presents the theme of stereotyping through the eyes of the narrator using persuasion to convince a him on how to get different girls. In the novel Persuasion, Jane Austen presents a question of social status and a difficulty of marriage by looking at Anne and her lover Wentworth’s values and beliefs. In both texts, the authors use persuasion to inform the reader of the lifestyles of the characters. In contrast, Diaz uses persuasion to command rather than depicting the character’s feelings and actions in Persuasion. The different obstacles described and compared by the persuasive pieces of literature such as race and social class help the audience to understand the characters’ actions and values.
Race is one of the obstacles presented, and it drives a Dominican’s reaction in “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black girl, White girl, or Halfie)” into a state of confusion and difficulty as a minority. The author commands the reader to do a bunch of things before going to a date; he says, “Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator…Hide the pictures of yourself with an Afro” (Diaz). The images of the government cheese and the pictures of the guy that he has to hide present poverty, inferior status of the narrator, and his origin. He does not want the girls that he tries to date to see his racial markers. He is not confident in accepting his race. This action may indicate that he values other people’s races more than his own race. Furthermore, the narrator complies with another instruction when he meets with a black girl , which states, “Run a hand through your hair like the whitebo...

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...oice to do. Because of Wentworth’s belief, self-persuasion, and misjudgement of Anne, this clearly fails Anne’s goal in reuniting with Wentworth.
There are a lot of obstacles that the characters in both Persuasion and Diaz’s short story have to face. The two major ones are social class and race. Both the authors use persuasion as part of their goal to analyze and to illustrate those two major obstacles or themes as well as to help the readers understand the character’s feelings and reasoning. The use of persuasion in everyday language is ubiquitous. People use the language of persuasion to get people’s attention, to manipulate people’s emotions, and to influence people’s mind into something that they want. Not everyone will believe in it. That is why persuasion can be seen in a good way or a bad way, unlike an argument, which can have various logical points of view.

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