Send It Back With the Love of Jesus: A Selection from Trevor Noah’s Son of Patricia (2018)

“I was really lucky growing up, because my mom is probably the most gangster human being you’ll ever meet in your life. Nothing got to her. Nothing fazed her. I remember one day in particular, walking through the streets together. And some guy across the road shouted something really mean at us. And I was about four or five years old and I turned and looked at my mom and I said, ‘Mommy, what do we do if people do the racism to us?’ My mom said, ‘Baby, you know what we do if somebody’s racist? We take that racism of theirs and we shake it up with the love of Jesus. And then we send it back.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘This lady’s crazy.’ She was crazy, but she was also right. I didn’t realize how right my mother was until decades later, which I feel is what always happens with your parents, right. They’re crazy, and then you get to their age and you’re like ‘Oh, that’s what it means.’ I only learned the lesson my mother was trying to teach me when I was a grown man. I was walking through the streets of Chicago, minding my own business. Some guy drove by in a pickup truck and called me the n-word. And I’m not going to lie. I was disappointed. Mostly because he was driving a pickup truck. Yeah, I just feel like that was an unnecessary stereotype that he didn’t need to perpetuate. You know, I feel like if you’re going to be racist, do something different. Think outside the box. Drive a Prius. Yeah, it’s better for the environment and it’s quiet. You can sneak up on me. We both win. But no, the guy was, he was driving a pickup truck. Called me the n-word. . . . What that man didn’t know was where I was from. More importantly, who he didn’t know was my mother. Because he thought it was just going to be a regular racist day. He thought he was gonna drive by, throw the n-word out, carry on with his life. He didn’t realize that that was the son of Patricia stepping into the road. . . . He shouted that word and out of nowhere, my body was like . . . . ‘Oh shit, this is it!’ And let me tell you something, L.A., it was so beautiful, because I didn’t plan it. I didn’t think about it. All I know is I stepped into the road, he drove his truck around, rolled the window, looked me dead in the eye, said, ‘Get out of the road, nigger.’ And I turned and and I was like, ‘Yo, my nigga.’ And he almost crashed and died. Yeah, I’ve never seen a human being question themselves so many times in a split-second in my life. Because I was smiling and I could see in his face he was like, ‘Wait, do I know you? Do I look like someone you know?’ And I don’t know why he did this, but I’ll never forget it. He looked at his hands. He looked at his hands like they’d somehow magically turned black. Like I had cursed him with a nigger bomb. . . . My mom always used to say . . . you can’t control what people do to you, but you can control how you react. So I promised myself. I said, ‘I’ll never give a racist person the pleasure of seeing my pain.’ It may be painful, may be hurtful, but I won’t give them the pleasure of seeing my pain.”—Trevor Noah, Son of Patricia (2018)