Trevor Noah, Multiracialism, and Racial Ambiguity Izze Thomas

On November 7, 2000, less than five years before I was born, Amendment 2 was put on the ballot in Alabama. It stated: “Proposing an [A]mendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, to abolish the prohibition of interracial marriages.” 40% of voters voted against the bill. In a 2015 Pew Research study on the multiracial experience, it was found that multiracial people who are perceived to be multiracial are twice as likely to experience discrimination than those who are perceived to only belong to one ethnic group. Even in my own experience, I have found that about half of the surveys that ask you to identify your race do not allow you to pick more than one option.

Multiracialism is a complex topic and a relatively new one. For hundreds of years, the idea of interracial conceptions were looked down upon, if not outright criminalized. Most people born out of an interracial coupling were simply assigned to either one race or the other. The history of multiracialism is fraught with hardships, yet as we can see through Kenton Butcher’s article, “Gaining currency: confession, comedy, and the economics of racial ambiguity in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, ” and Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime itself, multiracialism and racial ambiguity can also be a great benefit to those of us who have it.

Born a Crime is an autobiography discussing Trevor Noah’s life as a biracial man growing up in South Africa, one of the last countries in the world to decriminalize interracial coupling. His descriptions of how he had to spend the first several years of his life in hiding are juxtaposed sharply against the way he describes the privileges that were heaped upon him because of his perceived whiteness. Through this juxtaposition, Noah perfectly exemplifies one of the most prominent multiracial experiences: an unsteady balance of privilege and discrimination. Many multiracial people find themselves being simultaneously held up by those around them while also finding themselves ostracized by the very same people who hold them up. It is not uncommon for multiracial people to be told how attractive, unique, or interesting they are while also being told they cannot properly relate to the community that they are a part of. In fact, a 2019 study performed by Northwestern University found that the two most common stereotypes attributed to multiracial people were “attractive” and “not belonging,” clearly two terms with very different connotations.

Multiracial people, especially those who are born of both the privileged and discriminated races within a specific culture, can find themselves drifting between the status of privileged and discriminated against based solely on who they are talking to. Those of the dominant race will inherently view them as less, while those of the discriminated race will view them as a more familiar version of their oppressor, as can be seen in Born a Crime when Noah recounts how his grandfather referred to him as “Mastah” and refused to let him sit in the front seat because he viewed himself as the chauffeur and servant of his five year old grandson. This can present a conflict within many multiracial people where they are forced to decide whether or not they should allow their privilege to keep benefiting them even as it separates them from their community.

One of the most extreme examples of this concept is within the practice of racial passing. Passing was a dangerous practice with extreme consequences if you were to get caught, but the benefits were significant enough that those who had the opportunity to pass — mainly mixed race people — often took it. Those who were able to pass would be able to go after better opportunities, face less discrimination, and overall had a much more successful life, but that often came at the cost of their past and community. In order to safely pass, an individual would have to completely cut themselves from one half of their family, community, and identity which was often a very painful experience.

Though we often view passing as a Jim Crow and antebellum phenomenon, as Butcher points out, passing “never totally subsided.” It just “changed its contours as a social practice.” Now that both the consequences and benefits of passing are not so extreme, it has taken on a different purpose and methodology within our society. Instead of completely denying one race to get the benefits of another, racially ambiguous people have found ways to alter the way they might be perceived so that they can reap the benefits of whichever race will be the most beneficial in specific situations. As Butcher points out, Noah managed to perfect this practice through his “[mobilization of] various forms of cultural knowledge via social performances, which influenced readings of Noah’s identity.” This allowed him to access more forms of “social and economic mobility” and allowed him to survive in a segregated society. Even Noah himself admits to using this skill to his advantage when he dedicates an entire chapter of his book to the idea of being a “chameleon” and talks about how, though his “color didn’t change,” he could “change your perception of [his] color,” helped him to blend in with whoever he needed to. Through this skill he was not only able to save himself from racial violence and thus protect himself in a physical sense, but also a social one. Noah’s skills in language and culture encouraged the community that was so quick to reject him because of his skin color to accept him, while simultaneously making him appear superior to that same community in the eyes of the white people that he encountered.

Some multiracial people are able to take this a step further and combine the characteristics of their races in a way that makes them more palatable to larger groups of people. Consider Barack Obama, the United States’ first Black president. What most people do not consider about President Obama is that not only was he the first Black president, he was the 44th White one. His biological mother is white and over half of his childhood was spent living in exclusively white households, with the only exceptions being the first two years of his life and the four years between the ages of six and 10 that he spent living in Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. Culturally speaking, President Obama has much more of a connection to Whiteness than to Blackness and yet the entire country holds him up as the first Black president, which is no surprise. Multiple studies have found that multiracial people are much more likely to be viewed as the discriminated race by both the dominant and discriminated races of a culture, a phenomenon that can clearly be seen in President Obama. Yet, it is hard to deny that President Obama’s whiteness almost certainly helped him achieve the goal of becoming president. Though many insist on denying it, the United States is still a deeply racist country, and so President Obama’s knowledge of white culture as well as his largely white mannerisms and way of speaking gave him a massive advantage over other Black politicians as he was seen as more palatable to white voters. At the same time, his appearance and self-identification as Black made him popular not only with Black voters, but nearly all minorities. They were able to see themselves represented in a man who, in actuality, probably didn’t represent them as well as they thought. In this way, President Obama was able to use his multiracialism to his advantage and achieve a goal that would have been much harder for a monoracial Black person to achieve.

Though this essay has primarily focused on the advantages of being a multiracial person, it is important to remember that there are significant disadvantages too. To this day, racial mixing is still discouraged in a majority of cultures, as nearly everyone who has been in a mixed race relationship will tell you. To see an example of this, look no further than the December 3, 2022 episode of Saturday Night Live where comedian Micheal Che joked, “[t]he Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act which solidifies federal protections for interracial marriages. Okay but if I marry a white lady, who’s going to protect me from my mother.” The crowd reacted with a robust laugh, not the typical groans that accompany the nearly-over-the-line jokes that have become one of Che’s signatures. In this reaction, we can see that disdain towards racial mixing is still not seen as a negative or controversial thing. Rather, it is practically expected for a mother to rage against the idea of her son marrying a woman of a different race. Though this may seem like a harmless joke, what it is implying is that the children of such a coupling are flawed or otherwise tainted in some way. This leads to common stories among many mixed race people such as one or more of their grandparents refusing to meet them for the first several years of their life because they were disgusted by the idea of having a mixed race grandchild.

Additionally, multiracial people are often not allowed to identify as mixed race. Rather, we are forced to choose what we “really” are by the people around us or even by the government. As I mentioned earlier, only about half the surveys that ask you to identify your race will let you pick more than one option, and of those, about a quarter have a follow up question that asks something along the lines of “If you answered two or more to the previous question, which one do you most identify with.”

It’s hard to decide whether being mixed race is an advantage or disadvantage, but deciding between this or that is a largely monoracial idea. The essence of multiracialism is living in “ands.” I am White and Indian. Privileged and discriminated against. Advantaged and disadvantaged. To say that I am one and not the other would be a disservice to the full scope of my identity, and the identity of every other multiracial person who has grown up with the mark of an and seared into their being since birth.

Bibliography

Butcher, K. (2021). Gaining currency: confession, comedy, and the economics of racial ambiguity in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime , Safundi , 22:3, 225-244, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2021.1992095

Hurd Anyaso, H. (July 8, 2019). “Some Stereotypes Seem to Be Universally Applied to Biracial Groups in the U.S., New Study Finds.” Northwestern Now . news.northwestern. edu/stories/2019/06/some-stereotypes-seem-to-beuniversally-applied-to-biracial-groups-in-the-u-s-newstudy-finds/.

Ripley/Honolulu, A. (April 9, 2008). “The Story of Barack Obama’s Mother.” Time , Time Inc. content.time.com/ time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1729685,00.html.

Noah, T. (November 17, 2015). Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood . Cornelsen.