Born a crime: stories from a South African childhood

Review of Trevor Noah’s book

Hello, my climate darling :)

In today’s conversation, I want to talk about colored/mixed people. Recently, I finished Noah’s book, Born a Crime: stories from a South African Childhood, and this sentence caught my attention:

“As a kid, I understood that people were different colors, but in my head, white, black, and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it related to ‘race.’ I didn’t know what race was.”

The famous comedian Trevor Noah opened his heart and shared his feelings, experiences, and thoughts through the pages of his autobiography. He grew up in South Africa during apartheid, raised by a white father and a black mother, being the only mixed person in the family during one of the most dangerous historical times in South Africa.

I truly connected with his story because I am also the milk chocolate in my family. My dad is black and my mother is white, and for many years, I grew up with a lot of questions in my heart, without knowing who I was.

• Am I white? Of course not, just look at your skin.
• Am I black? No, stop with this bullshit. You are civilized, you have beautiful curls, and you have a good family. You are not like those poor abandoned girls from the slums.
• Am I mixed? Hmmmm… We don’t know. But what I do know is that if you don’t take much time in the sun, talk about blackness, and focus on what white people do, maybe you can get a little bit lighter.

“For all that black people have suffered, they know who they are. Colored people don’t.” (Trevor Noah)

Oh God, this was so confusing when I was younger!

My race epiphany came when I was 23 years old (read my article here :), I started to study this issue and had access to knowledge that during most of my life had been denied to me. Now I understand who I am: I am an Afro-Latin woman from Brasilândia, one of the biggest favelas (slums) in São Paulo and I created Perifa Sustentável Institute to change the reality of my community by building bridges to bring opportunities, access, and transformation to the place I call home.

“In America, the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.” (Trevor Noah)

Dear reader, this book gave me a lot of insights. It is a funny, deep, uncomfortable reading, that speaks directly to your heart. If you want to come out of your bubble and understand a little bit more about racism, apartheid policies, and the feelings of colored people, please, take a look at Noah’s book. I am pretty sure he will blow your mind (of course, in a positive way rs).

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Amanda Costa is a climate activist, young adviser to the UN Global Compact, founder of the Sustainable Perifa Institute, and presenter of #TemClimaParaisso?, a program about the climate crisis. Graduated in International Relations, Amanda was recognized as #Under30 in Forbes magazine, TEDx Speaker, LinkedIn Top Voices and Creator and in 2021 she was deputy curator of Global Shapers, the youth community of the World Economic Forum.