Born A Crime

I know Trevor Noah from The Daily Show. I know his humor, I appreciate his humor, I knew he wasn't born here but I couldn't quite figure out what his accent was. I had no idea that he was truly born a crime!

Trevor Noah was born to a black, Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father in South Africa at a time when such a partnership was considered illegal and punishable by imprisonment, with the resulting child placed into an orphanage. He was literally born a crime. His parents never married which brought with it its own set of challenges.

Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood is Noah's coming-of-age memoir. It was a fascinating book, at the same time a personal story as well as about a category of people, colored people, that I never was aware of at all. There were black people, there were white people. And colored people were basically the mixed race. Noah falls into that category.

Even though his mother was black, the two of them seemed to go amongst the different races pretty comfortably. During apartheid, Trevor, his mother and his father all kind of lived in the shadows. But after apartheid, they lived openly. His mother really was quite bold. As a result of all this, though, young Trevor always felt like an outsider. He didn't fit in with the whites, he didn't fit in with the blacks - although he identified as a black, and he didn't fit in as colored since the colored kids he came in contact with were the children of parents who themselves were mixed. It was legal for a mixed race person to mate with another mixed race person and give birth to colored children. Mind boggling!

Many of the stories are horrifying while others are heartwarming. But Noah's signature sense of humor is apparent throughout the book. It's probably what allowed him to survive. The only thing I felt was missing from the book was an epilogue. Now I'm curious as to how he got from where he was in South Africa to touring as a comedian throughout Europe to The Daily Show. This memoir does paint a picture of what life was like for a child coming of age in South Africa after the end of apartheid.

I want to end with my reflections on a quote from the book:

In Germany, no child finished high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it - what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer having over the whole thing. "Well, that was shameful, now wasn't it?"

In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren't taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it's taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: "There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it's done." It was the same for us. "Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let's move on." Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. "Whatever you do, don't make the kids angry." 

This made me think about the way I taught about social justice - and injustice - while teaching fifth grade in New Jersey. I wanted the kids to feel the injustice. To know that it wasn't over. That it wasn't time to move on. Getting the kids angry was a way to get the kids to think.

I'd recommend this book.