Born a Crime

Noah uses the irony in these two statements to create a humorous effect, wherein the reader is meant to see the darkly humorous absurdity of colonization. 

In the first passage, the irony lies in the Indigenous person's response to their colonizer: "We do need to be saved—saved from you." This sarcastic yet truthful declaration highlights a glaring issue with proselytization through colonization. Throughout history, colonizers who spread religion tended to assume that the Indigenous people they encountered were savages and needed to be morally and spiritually "saved." What the Indigenous person in this passage explains is that colonizers were simply creating situations from which the Indigenous people needed to be saved. The conflicting relationship between these two concepts—being saved by a savior and needing to be saved from a savior—creates situational irony. 

In the second passage, Noah compares three groups of people: Native Americans who pray to wolves, Africans who pray to their ancestors, and White people who pray to "a guy who turns water into wine." In reality, outside of the realm of religion, each of these beliefs could be painted as strange. However, without offering any additional evidence, Christians (particularly White Christians, in the context of Noah's memoir) deem their beliefs common sense and others primitive and savage. By framing Christianity in this way, Noah implies that their arbitrary reasoning is unjustified and as illogical as apartheid itself. Using this flawed logic, Noah sarcastically calls Christian beliefs "common sense" in comparison to others, creating verbal irony in the passage. 

In this passage, Noah compares his life at home to the American justice system, which is accused of offering leniency and forgiveness to White people while depriving resources from and unfairly punishing Black people. With Noah's classic sense of humor and childlike brazenness, he describes these systematically ingrained prejudices as "perks," ironically undermining the system as a whole. The fact that Noah wrote this reflection as an adult, fully aware of the racial complexities of 21st-century society, brings another level of wit to the passage. In ironically admitting that "he was having a great time," Noah concedes that such treatment is wrong. Yet, it is understandable for a child to enjoy such injustice when his benefits include not being punished for "stealing granny's cookies."

Once again, Noah uses comparison as a method of mutual understanding—a bridge between the radical and the unchanging, between the ideals of the free world and the world still stuck in the past. The metaphor comparing White people's homes to prisons highlights these dichotomous principles. The device helps the reader to understand, in their own vocabulary, how completely isolated each racial group was during apartheid. And yet, there is situational irony in how the White neighborhoods are so afraid—White fear, as Noah calls it—of Black crime that they put themselves in "plush, fancy maximum-security prison[s]." The irony lies in being so afraid of a possible crime or uprising that the White people imprison themselves. In this way, the so-called criminals are running free, controlling the lawful through instilled fear. 

While the topics of White fear and segregated communities are sobering, Noah manages to insert some humor into the situation by comparing himself to a Peeping Tom. Despite the implications and danger, Noah is just a boy in need of a friend, peeking into people's prison yards to see if anyone wants to play with him. This downplay of seriousness through humor is a trademark of the book. Noah's memoir poses the following questions: How did children growing up during apartheid view themselves and the problems at hand? What was their perspective and how did they overcome the challenges they faced? Noah tackles these questions with not only a comedian's touch but with the levity of a child's perspective.