Quotes from Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime
A compilation of quotes and excerpts
Review: Short, easy read. Hilarious stories spliced in with life lessons and deep insights.
On the importance of seeing the world
We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. (…) People thought my mom was crazy (for bringing me to places conventionally visited by white people only). Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these things were izinto zabelungu — the things of white people. So many people had internalized the logic of apartheid and made it their own. Why teach a black child white things? Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom: ‘Why do this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?
‘Because,’ she would say, ‘even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”(pp. 73–74)
On language and communication
On the importance of speaking a foreign language:
Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, ‘I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.” (pp. 236)
On how language overrides race in forging rapport:
I became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you. (pp. 56)
On regret
I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have to answer to. “What if…” “If only…””I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days. (pp.143)
On people hurting each other
In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.(pp. 221)
On life’s pain and the triumph over it
The importance of forgetting about pain and trauma:
I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it’s time to get up to some shit again. (pp 90–91)
On not becoming bitter:
Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter. (pp. 66)
On choice and victimhood:
I was angry with my mother (for not leaving her abusive husband, Abel). I hated him (Abel), but I blamed her. I saw Abel as a choice she’d made, a choice she was continuing to make. My whole life, telling me stories about growing up in the homelands, being abandoned by her parents, she had always said, “You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.
She never let me see us as victims. We were victims, me and my mum, Andrew and Issac. Victims of apartheid. Victims of abuse. But I was never allowed to think that way, and I didn’t see her life that way. (pp. 271–272)
On Hustling
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet — tweets, Facebook posts, lists — you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. (pp. 217)
On Money
The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.
On the dangers of a poor mentality
‘The black tax’:
So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it “the black tax.” Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero. (pp. 66)
The hood:
The hood is a low-stress, comfortable life. All your mental energy goes into getting by, so you don’t have to ask yourself any of the big questions. Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? Am I doing enough? In the hood you can be a forty-year-old man living in your mom’s house asking people for money and it’s not looked down on. You never feel like a failure in the hood, because someone’s always worse off than you, and you don’t feel like you need to do more, because the biggest success isn’t that much higher than you, either. It allows you to exist in a state of suspended animation. (pp. 219)
On escaping the hood:
The hood has a gravitational pull. It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you leave. Because by making the choice to leave, you’ve insulted the place that raised you and made you and never turned you away. And the place flights you back.
As soon as things start going well for you in the hood, it’s time to go. Because the hood will drag you back in. It will find a way. There will be a guy who steals a thing and puts it in your car and the cops find it- something. You can’t saty. You think you can. You’ll start doing better and you’ll bring your hood friends out to a nice club, and the next thing you know somebody starts a fight and one of your friends pulls a gun and somebody’s getting shot and you’re left standing around going, “What just happened?”
The hood happened. (pp. 219–220)
On helping the poor
I had a natural talent for selling to people, but without knowledge and resources, where was that going to get me? People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves?
People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing. Working with Andrew (a white classmate) was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, “Okay, here’s what you need, and here’s how it works.” Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say, “Oh, that’s a handout.” No. I still have to work to profit by it. (pp 191)
On Crime
On the ambiguity of what constitutes crime:
“It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it. But the hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing to participate in. If a crackhead (someone who steals things to resale) comes through and he’s got a crate of Corn Flakes boxes he’s stolen out of the back of a supermarket, the poor mom isn’t thinking, ‘I’m aiding and abetting a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes.’ No. She’s thinking, ‘My family needs food and this guy has Corn Flakes’, and she buys the Corn Flakes.” (pp. 213–214)
Crime fills the gaps where the government fails:
The hood made me realise that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.”(pp. 209)
On living in an abusive household
Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either love or hate them, but that’s not how people are.
There was an undercurrent of terror that ran through the house, but the actual beatings themselves were not frequent. I think if they had been, the situation would have ended sooner. Ironically, the good times in between were what allowed it to drag out and escalate as far as it did. He hit my mom once, then the next time was three years again, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was two years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was a year later, and it was just a little bit worse. It was sporadic enough where you’d think it wouldn’t happen again, but it was frequent enough that you never gorget it was possible There was a rhythm to it. I remember one time, after one terrible incident, nobody spoke time to him for over a month. no words, no eye contact, no conversations, nothing. We moved through the house as strangers, at different times. Complete silent treatment. Then one morning you’re in the kitchen and there’s a nod. “Hey.” “Hey.”Thena week it’s “Did you see the thing on the news?” “Yeah.” Then the next week there’s a joke and a laugh. Slowly, slowly life goes back to how it was. Six months, a year later, you do it again. (pp.267–268)
On Love
You don’t own the thing you love:
(after finding out his dog Fufi would go to another family during the day and be their dog)
Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn't true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. The experience shaped what I've felt about relationships for the rest of my life. You do not own the thing that you love (pp. 100)
On acknowledging people you love:
I’d walk through the house on the way to my room and say, “Hey Mom” without glancing up. She’d say, “No Trevor! You look at me You acknowledge me. Show me that I exit to you, because the way you treat me is the way you will treat women. Women like to be noticed. Come and noticed. Come and acknowledge me and let me know that you see me. Don’t just see me when you need something.” (pp.125)
On tough love:
Because there were some black parents who’d actually do that, not pay their kid’s bail, not hire their kid a lawyer — the ultimate tough love. But it doesn’t always work., because you’re giving the kid tough love when maybe he just needs love, You’re trying to teach him a lesson, and now that lesson is the rest of his life. (pp. 228)
On the triumph of love over violence:
I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn’t see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others.
I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them.(pp.262)
Misc
Some lessons from his abusive stepfather, Abel:
Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage. (pp.253)
He (Abel) thinks he’s the policeman of the world,” she said. “And that’s the problem with the world. We have people who cannot police themselves, so they want to police everyone else around them.” (pp. )
The realisation that his mother beats him to try to keep him out of trouble:
The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.” (pp. 243)
How his father never understood apartheid:
He just never understood how white people could be racist in South Africa. “Africa is full of black people,” he would say. “So why would you come all the way to Africa if you hate black people? If you hate black people so much, why did you move into their house?” To him it was insane.(pp. 104)
When he decided to pick ‘white’ in prison for his own safety when he’s always identified as black:
Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.
That day, I picked white.
Want to read more? Get the book here. Readers from Singapore can borrow the book from here. And if you still don’t know who Trevor Noah is, sit in the shame corner and watch his Youtube channel.
