Born a Crime Discussion Questions

How does Patricia Noah defy the rules of apartheid in Born a Crime?

As a Black woman, Patricia Noah defies the institution of apartheid when she makes her home in a white area of Johannesburg. Each time she gets caught, she pays the fine and continues to live in the white area. She defies the rules again when she dates a white man. Her most profound act of defiance is having a child with her white boyfriend, which for her is punishable by up to four years in prison. For her boyfriend, the punishment is up to five years in prison. If the authorities find out about the child, they can take him away from Patricia and put him in an orphanage. For Patricia, however, the benefit of having a child of her own and her belief in her ability to survive outweigh these drawbacks.

How does Patricia Noah manage to break the cycle of poverty in Born a Crime?

Patricia Noah attends an English missionary school when she is a child, which gives her the language skills to continue her education in a secretarial program. When she begins working as a secretary at one of the first white-collar jobs available to Blacks, she earns a decent income. But she lives at home, and her mother requires her to give all of the money to the family. In order to improve her situation and move forward in life, Patricia is forced to leave her family and strike out on her own. She separates from her family to avoid paying what she calls “the Black tax,” in which people like her cannot improve their lives because they spend everything they earn trying to bring their impoverished families closer to a decent standard of living. The Black tax would leave Patricia without any resources for improvement.

Patricia not only leaves her family but moves to a white area of the city where she is legally not supposed to live. But in the white area she finds housing by renting from a white person, and this puts her near the white-collar jobs for which she is qualified. This provides opportunities for her to advance her career and increase her income.

How do language skills both help and complicate the author’s life in Born a Crime?

Trevor Noah’s mother, Patricia, makes sure he speaks English as his primary language because it is the language of commerce and education. She also teaches him her native Xhosa, and he picks up several other tongues. These languages enable him to communicate with diverse groups of people, sometimes getting him out of trouble. When people don’t know who he is, he can reach out to them by using their own languages. However, his shyness around girls backfires when he ends up at his matric dance (senior prom) with a girl who only speaks one language—and not one that Noah knows. In another instance, Noah’s ability to speak to a prisoner in jail proves an advantage that not only keeps him safe by aligning him with a dangerous-looking man but also teaches him that if you speak to a person in his language, it “goes to his heart.”

What factors contribute to the fiasco at the Jewish school with the dancer Hitler in Born a Crime?

Trevor Noah has a successful and popular DJ team that gigs all around the city, but they always perform for Black audiences. When they perform at a Jewish school, the audience is deeply offended by the dancer named Hitler. In a complete misunderstanding, Noah thinks the woman who kicks them out is racist, and the woman can’t understand why Noah doesn’t view cheering for “Hitler” as racist. Black parents are required to choose European names for their children, but they don’t know what the names mean because they haven’t been taught history; they only learn about agriculture and how to work on roads. Even the dancer Hitler doesn’t know what his name means, while the woman at the Jewish school doesn’t know that the Black population is ignorant of European history. In the end, they are all experiencing the results of various forms of racism.

Why might Trevor Noah have chosen to downplay his eventual fame in Born a Crime?

Noah’s primary interest is not in his successes as a performer. He barely mentions America, the location of some of his greatest triumphs, except as a source of pop culture. Rather, he is interested in presenting his journey to adulthood as a sort of crucible, a vessel that is used to burn metals to form new alloys. As painful as his childhood was, the difficult experiences taught him valuable lessons and brought out his talents for assimilating and entertaining as a means of survival. Above all, he presents his mother as the single most influential figure in his life with her fierce dedication to showing him how to rise above poverty and violence. He closes his acknowledgements by thanking Patricia for making him “the man [he is] today.”