"In the hood," Trevor Noah writes, "everybody knows who the best dancer in the crew is. He's like your status symbol. When you're poor you don't have cars or nice clothes, but the best dancers get the girls, so that's the guy you want to roll with. Hitler was our guy" (pg 193).
In his New York Times best selling memoir, Born A Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah dedicates an entire chapter to his good friend and great dancer, Hitler. And the result is absolutely brilliant. Just like Hitler.
"I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history," he continues,
But I often wonder, with African atrocities like the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don't have that the Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that's really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It's harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren't counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal?
So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he's just another strongman from the history books . . .
Because to many South Africans, Hitler was a kind of "army tank that was helping the Germans win the war, or a man so powerful that "at some point black people had to go help white people fight against him - and if the white man has to stoop to ask the black man for help fighting someone, that someone must be the toughest guy of all time" (pg 194). So mothers named their son's Hitler. Because they wanted them to be strong and tough.
So Trevor Noah, while working and thriving as a DJ, had a friend and dancer named Hitler. And it was never a problem. Until King David School hired them for a school dance. It was a Jewish school.
A short while into their set, Trevor started getting the crowed psyched, "Are you guys ready?!" he screamed, and they were. They yelled and hollered and screamed back, "Yeeeeaaaahhhhhh!"
"All right! Give it up and make some noise for HIIIIIIIITTTTTTLLLLLEEEERRRRRR!!!!" Trevor writes. Then, "The whole room stopped. No one was dancing. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, the hundreds of Jewish kids in their yarmulkes - they froze and stared aghast at us up on the stage" (pg 197). Seconds later, a teacher was on stage, yelling and berating and demanding that the boys apologize. But Trevor didn't understand, was she offended by his dance moves? Where they a bit too sexual and offensive? Either way, she should have know because that's what she hired, those dance moves are their culture. He hadn't a clue that the name Hitler was offensive, and she hadn't a clue that he hadn't a clue.
They both operated from a truth they believed was universal, and they both interpreted the other through that preconceived truth. Neither was right, and neither was wrong. But they both lost.
Other Favorite quotes and ideas:
“If you stop to consider the ramifications, you’ll never do anything” (pg 22).
“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people” (pg 56).
“Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening” (pg 57).
“A knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom” (pg 61).
“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 generation 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” (pg 66).
(Advice from Mother) “Learn from your past and be better because of your past, 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” (pg 66).
“Catholic school is not the place to be creative and independent” (pg 88).
“You do not own the thing that you love” – story about Fufi (pg 100).
“When a parent is absent, you’re left in the lurch of not knowing, and it’s so easy to fill that space with negative thoughts. ‘They don’t care.’ ‘They’re selfish.’” (pg 108) . . . “Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being” (pg 110).
“That’s where the government came up with things like the pencil test. If you were applying to be white, the pencil went into your hair. If it fell out, you were white. If it stayed in, you were colored. You were what the government said you were. Sometimes that came down to a lone clerk eyeballing your face and making a snap decision. Depending on how high your cheekhones were or how broad your nose was, he could tick whatever box made sense to him, thereby deciding where you could live, whom you could marry, what jobs and rights and privileges you were allowed (pg 119).
For the first in my life I had money, and it was the most liberating thing in the world. The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want toe be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money” (pg 188).
“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 first part of the analogy that’s missing” (pg 190).
“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 (pg 221).
“There were some {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” (pg 228).