Abstract
Whitney N. Laster Pirtle on Born a Crime.
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah, Spiegel & Grau, 2016, 304 pages
How does it feel to be a problem? W.E.B. Du Bois posed this question over a century ago to critique American institutions that constructed being American as White, and therefore, made being Black an inherent problem in White America. Du Bois’s question was also a demand: that we reflect on and critique a system of racial oppression that teaches those in subjugated positions that their very being is problematic.
Interestingly, this is also a question that Trevor Noah, South African comedian and host of Comedy Central’s award-winning newscast The Daily Show, engages in his highly acclaimed memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Though Noah is not a trained sociologist, he uses the complexity and absurdity of his life to tease out numerous sociological concepts. Throughout his odyssey, he places issues of race and identity at the forefront. The most salient question is what does it mean to be born a problem?
The book begins with an excerpt from South Africa’s 1927 Immorality Act, which deemed any “European” person who had intercourse with a “native” person “guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment.” It is no accident that Noah begins his memoir by citing this linchpin legislation that set in motion the apartheid regime in South Africa. During this period, distinct racial lines were drawn in order to enforce a rigid racial hierarchy privileging a small White ruling class and disadvantaging all others. If a society is to be structured along distinct racial lines, those lines cannot be blurred. As Noah puts it, “[b]ecause a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the systems, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason” (p. 21). Thus, when Noah’s African mother decided to have a child with a White Swiss-German man in 1984, their son’s birth was, in fact, a crime.
Being born a problem meant, among other things, facing rejection time and time again. Noah rightfully feared being revealed as multiracial to White South Africans, because they had the power to orphan him and jail his mother. He feared social ostracism from his Black family and neighbors as well. Of his time in Soweto, he recalls that other kids were often shocked to see him on the street: “some would run away… Others would run up and try to touch me to see if I was real. It was pandemonium” (p. 53). To be born a problem was to be marked as an outsider.
Just as the crime of being born into a non-distinct racial category complicates things like social belonging and self-esteem, it disrupts systems of classification. That is, if interracial marriage and sex was illegal, then what did that make mixed-race offspring? What is Trevor Noah? Like many multiracial persons in the United States, Noah understood that, when he was asked, “What are you?” the question really meant “What race are you?” Unlike multiracial Americans, young Noah could not answer by revealing that he was mixed. In a place where there wasn’t supposed to be any race mixing, there wasn’t supposed to be anyone mixed race. Noah wasn’t supposed to be.
Noah shares fascinating stories—sometimes hilarious, sometimes gut-wrenching—from his quest to understand himself and his place in a highly race-conscious society to his attempts to answer “What am I?” For instance, Noah recalls childhood ruminations: “in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate… So when the other kids in Soweto called me ‘white,’… I just thought they had their colors mixed up” (p. 54). Noah described himself as similar to the other kids—still chocolate—just a slightly different hue. Like others, this example reflects a continuous, unresolved search by Noah and his readers for a definitive answer about his racial identity. Rather than a shortcoming, this lack of resolution is an accurate way of situating the story: race is socially constructed, and its symbolic meaning changes over time and throughout space. For Noah, birth into a nonexistent category gave him fluidity in the racial categories he could adopt over time.
Yet, despite his malleable racial identity and deep connection to Blackness, at the time of his “criminal” birth Noah was classified as “Coloured,” in line with the 1950 Population Registration Act, which defined those assigned as Coloured by what they were not—neither native (Black) nor White. “Coloured” was thus a catch-all for those neither at the top nor the bottom of the racial hierarchy. It was strategically employed during apartheid, providing a sort of racial buffer group. Coloureds were, as one Guardian journalist, Monica Mark, named it in a 2013 article on the death of Nelson Madela, in racial limbo—a unique, suspended but malleable, position in South Africa.
It was only once that Noah identified as Coloured. As a teen, Noah was arrested on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle after taking a junker car from his stepfather’s shop and jailed for a week. In jail, he donned a Coloured accent in order to survive and fit neatly into rigid racialized prison groups. He did not have Coloured family, though, so it was hard for him to connect to something that was not real to him. As Noah mentions, this lack of history and social connection is a struggle for many Coloureds in South Africa even today: “The history of colored people in South Africa is, in this respect, worse than the history of Black people in South Africa. For all that Black people have suffered, they know who they are. Colored people don’t” (p 116).
The same Guardian journalist also described Coloureds’ immense soul-searching. It is as though they have spent their lives asking the collective question, “What are we?” because their births have posed a problem for neat classification schemes.
While Noah was transitioning to host of The Daily Show in 2015, I was in South Africa talking to Coloureds about their racial identity. My discussion with Jon-Arthur, a father, mechanical worker, and part-time DJ, offers an interesting parallel to Noah’s racial identity experiences. Jon-Arthur told me, “nobody sat me down and said, ‘We are Coloured because we are this.’ It was never like that.” It was through the political struggle to end apartheid, Jon-Arthur said, that he learned about who he was as a non-White person. Still frustrated with the plight and position of Coloureds, Jon-Arthur is one of many seeking to create and recreate what it means to be Coloured today. He would like, for instance, greater recognition of Coloured people’s connection to the Khoikhoi, the indigenous people of the Western Cape with whom the Dutch first interacted in the Cape. Identifying as Khoikhoi or Khoisan, they believe, will further distance the Coloured people from the legacy of apartheid and better solidify their rights to land and resources. Jon-Arthur is now prepared for another fight: “This is who I am. This is who I need to be. This is who I need to live like, and I need to stand for that… And if you’re not gonna allow me for that space to be me, I’m gonna fight you for that space to be me.”
Noah, in a different way than Jon-Arthur, undergoes a similar a journey for self-discovery. His is, in many ways, a journey to uncover a racial identity that might both reflect how he sees himself and receive validation from others. I argue this process is heightened among those in racial limbo, whose betweenness makes the search for racial identity complex and the reconstruction of racial status quo possible. Racial limbo has the potential to both uphold and deconstruct racial hierarchies, because those in racial limbo are constantly searching for their space within the racial hierarchy.
Themes regarding racial identity development, the social construction of race, negotiating racialized otherness, and the impact of racism abound in Born a Crime. Given racist apartheid South Africa is the background for much of Noah’s story, it is easy to read the text through a lens of race. It shapes all aspects of South Africans’ lives. Yet, there are many other sociological concepts to engage with in this book. Education scholars will appreciate Noah’s juxtaposition of private and public schools and his recollections of how school administrators attempted to place him into particular academic tracks depending on how they perceived his race. Criminologists will engage fruitfully with his discussion of jails and how certain groups navigate the criminal justice system. Religious scholars can appreciate the overview of various religions in South Africa, their differences across racial status, and Noah’s take on the value and limitations of religious viewpoints for marginalized groups. And economic scholars have much to learn from his insights regarding underground labor markets and critiques of global capitalist expansions.
Noah’s surreal humor capitalizes on the absurd. With every page turn and belly laugh comes a robust analysis of the ways political, economic, and social systems can be oppressive. Indeed, Born A Crime is an important text: it allows readers to engage with a hilarious, honest, and well-reasoned comment on important contemporary social problems. Although the sociological themes abound, Noah does not always have all of the tools necessary to dissect the concepts he engages. Still, reading this text alongside other, more traditionally researched works will help students of society capture a comprehensive understanding of race and other social problems in South Africa—both as a topic and a lived experience.
The value of reading this work through a critical race lens cannot be overestimated: Noah encourages us to think through more complex and meaningful responses to the “What are you?” question. But what’s more, I believe interrogating the social construction of race by using case studies like this can push us toward a much-needed refining of the question that can better reflect the social, economic, and political factors that shape individual racial identifications and the identity work behind them.