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Trevor Noah’s searing memoir ridicules the absurdities of racism.

Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah’s decision to give birth “was a crazy, reckless” one, her son, the South African comedian Trevor Noah, writes in his memoir, Born a Crime. For much of his childhood, Noah’s parents—a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father—could not be seen together; Patricia could not even interact with her son in public. “During apartheid,” Noah writes, “one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race.” The penalty was five years in prison. “Where most children are proof of their parents’ love,” he explains, “I was the proof of their criminality.”

Yet while it was illegal to be “mixed” (to have a black parent and a white parent), it was not illegal to be what South Africans call “colored” (to have two mixed parents). Patricia enrolled her son in a colored school and enlisted the help of a colored neighbor to transport him. The neighbor would “walk next to me and act like she was my mother,” Noah recounts, “and my mother would walk a few steps behind, like she was the maid working for the colored woman. I’ve got dozens of pictures of me walking with this woman who looks like me but who isn’t my mother. And the black woman standing behind us who looks like she’s photo-bombing the picture, that’s my mom.”

In Born a Crime, Noah recounts his odd and precarious journey from extreme poverty and oppression in South Africa to the brink of his professional breakthrough. Throughout, his ability to move between starkly different social worlds—and to find humor in society’s double standards—proves the result of this initial, drastic inability to fit in anywhere. With the platform he’s built, he has a real chance to influence the way millions of young people think and speak about race, a reconsideration his gripping biography seems to demand.

Born in 1984, Noah spent some of his early years in his grandmother’s cramped home in Soweto, where he was the only light-skinned person in sight—and, often, got away with murder. When he misbehaved, his grandmother balked at hitting him—even though she beat the living daylights out of his dark-skinned cousins for lesser infractions. (“I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she explained.) His grandfather addressed Trevor as “Mastah,” and insisted on driving him in the backseat, like a chauffeur. “There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a black family, I can’t even front,” Noah wryly observes. His status in Soweto was so rare that people used him as a landmark when giving directions: “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.”

Noah’s uncommon position—he never directly encountered another mixed child like himself—gave him a unique perspective on the artificiality of racial categorization. Under apartheid, racism in South Africa was even more absurd and convoluted than its American iteration. Chinese people in South Africa, for example, were classified as “black,” while the more economically advantaged Japanese were given honorary “white” status. “I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job is to make sure that people of the wrong color aren’t doing the wrong thing,” Noah writes. “He sees an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench: “Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!” “Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”

Noah adeptly skewers the smallness of the racism, but he doesn’t see through the larger lie. He never flat-out states that race does not exist, and he never seriously questions that he is black. This is understandable, but it feels like a missed opportunity. The idea that we must rise above racism is an admirable one. The idea that we must rise above race is a revolutionary one.

Perhaps such a critique is too much to ask of a comedian. And what Noah has achieved is incredible in its own right. As a child, he became a chameleon fluent in multiple tongues: He learned to speak not only English, but the Xhosa of his family, tribal dialects like Zulu and Tsonga that whites and coloreds seldom deigned to learn, and Afrikaans. It was through mastery of language that he figured out how to bridge the vast distances between himself and others imposed by his skin. His worldliness was a lifeline, another gift from Patricia. “My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do,” he observes. “When I look back, I realize she raised me like a white kid.”