Reading Diary: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Here is a blurb from Wikipedia:

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood is an autobiographical comedy book written by South African comedian Trevor Noah, published in 2016. The book focuses on Noah's childhood growing up in South Africa after he was born of an illegal interracial relationship during the apartheid era. The book was a bestseller and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

I've had an e-copy of this book for several years, but I finally read the paperback copy that I bought for my classroom library. If you don't know who Trevor Noah is, he took over as host of The Daily Show from John Stewart back in 2015. He stepped down in 2022, and I'm not sure what his next big project is. Last year, we read a chapter from this book, "Chameleon," with my sophomore class last year. It was an anchor text in a personal narrative unit. I like Noah's comedy, and his voice in the memoir is just as engaging.

This weekend, I learned that Idaho is following Florida's draconian and cruel "Parental Rights" bills, which included the librarian at my best friend's school taking out a ton of books, including biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr, who by this point has been so sanitized in American media it's VERY clear that the state wants to take anyone who is not a cishet white male out of the curriculum. In that boiling anger, I read Noah's work, which so clearly shows how education is one path out of poverty. He talks about the "teach a man to fish" parable, rightly saying that teaching is all well and good, but you also need to give them a fishing pole. He also writes in one chapter, "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.” Idaho has always been a bit limiting, and it's becoming even worse. It's safe to say that Noah's book, even the edition for Young Readers, which I imagine has some of the swearing taken out, although I think the regular version is perfectly fine for at least high schoolers, will NOT be welcome in Idaho libraries, and that, friends, is a fucking crime.