Born a Crime: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

In his preface, Trevor Noah explains that his family manages to move into a white neighborhood by buying a house from the one family “that Does Not Give a Fuck.” (Every white neighborhood has one.) They end up in Highlands North, a middle-class area where Trevor is literally “the only black kid.” (Most of the residents are Jews, who “don’t flee. They’re done fleeing. They’ve already fled.”) In this new neighborhood, it is difficult to make friends because “everyone lived behind walls,” with the houses closer to “fancy maximum-security prison[s],” surrounded by electric wire. The only friends Trevor can find are the children of domestic workers.

Trevor makes one close friend at his new school: Teddy, who is also “naughty as shit” and plays pranks with him. Teddy’s mother works in a white family’s house a 40-minute walk away—and they walk “all over Johannesburg together,” for hours. They start stealing liquor-filled chocolates from the mall, but one day, a cop sees them and brings a dozen others to chase after them. They make it back to Trevor’s neighborhood, where he knows he can squeeze his way through a hole in the fence at the end of a dead-end street and escape. However, Teddy goes the other way. Trevor squeezes through the fence, goes home, and waits for Teddy—who never shows up and does not even come to school the next day.

Teddy’s parents visit Patricia and explain that he has been arrested for shoplifting—Patricia insists Trevor must have been involved, but he denies it and believes he has gotten away with a “solid alibi.” The next day, Trevor gets called to the principal’s office, where the principal, three mall cops, and a teacher are waiting. They explain that Teddy has been expelled and ask if, as Teddy’s best friend, Trevor knows anything about the matter. He denies it—and then the police pull out security camera footage. Trevor is shocked; they play the video back and it clearly shows him, shoplifting with Teddy.

Then the teacher asks Trevor if he “know[s] of any white kids that Teddy hangs out with.” Trevor is confused, but soon realizes what’s going on: in the black-and-white footage, Trevor looks white, while Teddy looks black. The adults ask Trevor over and over if he knows who the white accomplice could possibly be—but never see that it is obviously him. They are “so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them.”