I didn’t come to Trevor Noah through late night TV or his comedy spots. I first became a fan after reading his 2016 memoir, “Born a Crime,” which recounts his experience growing up mixed-race during the final years of apartheid in South Africa. Both of my parents made it a point to connect the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to what was happening in South Africa as I came of age in the 1990s. On a family trip there just before 9/11, we were treated well as Americans, but I still remember overhearing our host refer to an elderly Black South African cleaner as “boy” when he thought no one was listening — a moment that stayed with me.
