Everybody's Buddy Nobody's Friend

What I Read: While reading, I found out that when Trevor was in middle school he didn't have any friends but he was known throughout his new school. He explains how he would be the first one to reach the tuck shop (cafeteria). Because he was known in the school, other kids started asking him to buy their lunch for them. He could run faster than anyone else and he could line up first to get food, so that made him popular in a way.  But he still wasn't really a part of any group.

In these chapters Trevor tells a story about how he stole chocolates filled with alcohol.  He did this with his friend Teddy.  Teddy is one of Trevor's first best friends, and he is black.  He is the son of a maid who lives in Trevor's neighborhood.  Trevor and Teddy spend most of their time together.  One night, they get caught stealing the chocolates.  They go separate ways as they run away from the cops and we realize that Trevor escapes while Teddy gets arrested.  Soon the police contact the school authorities about the robbery and Trevor gets called in for questioning.  The police show Trevor a black and white tape of what happened that night.

On the tape it looks like Trevor is white next to Teddy, who is black.  The camera captures Trevor's skin tone as white even if he only has light skin.  "These people have been so f**ked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for is sitting right in front of them" (Noah, Location 2237).



Trevor also talks about romance issues he's had during his adolescence.  His first crush is a "coloured" girl and her name is Maylene.  Trevor and Maylene became a couple for Valentine's Day, but Maylene breaks up with him to stay with a handsome white boy.  Next, Trevor falls in love with Zaheera, but nothing ever happens because she moves away to the United States and Trevor never had the guts to tell her.  Despite the fact that Zaheera liked him too.

Last, Trevor talks about getting a date for senior prom.  He takes a girl called Babiki who is the most beautiful girl he's ever seen.  They have been going out for two months, but they have never spent time together alone.  He takes he to the dance and she refuses to get out of his car.  He figures out that she does not speak English.  She only speaks Pedi.  Trevor speaks many langauages but not Pedi.  He can't talk to her.  They are in a terrible situation and Trevor realizes that in all this month he's never really tried to talk to her.  

What I Thought About:  While reading these chapters I found out that after apartheid ended, South Africa had 11 official languages.  These aren't even all the languages, it's just the most common ones.  Trevor describes how common it is to not understand what other people are saying and how you get used to figuring out the gist of a conversation without really speaking that language.  He says that in his head, all conversations get remembered in English, although they are spoken in different languages.  This is something that I totally understand.  For example, even though I know that I had a conversation with a friend in Spanish, it comes back to me in English when I think about it later.  I'm not sure why I do that, but it just happens.  The same seems to happen to Trevor, too.

The other issue from what I read that I thought about is the racism that so many people don't even know they have.  When Trevor and his friend were caught on camera shoplifting, they didn't even know that it was Trevor who was the "white" person on the tape because they couldn't figure out that he would look like that on video.  As you can tell from the picture, Trevor has sort of light skin.  Because of this, the camera captured him as white.  It seems incredible to me though, that the people looking for the boy in the video couldn't figure out that Trevor was that boy.

What I Conclude: I've always known that people were racist. When I was in 4th grade, a boy on the bus told me that I'm a white person who just paints herself black.  He said that because I'm much lighter than my dad.  I was hurt, but I wasn't that surprised because I know that people are often racist and really ignorant about racism.  

Still, though, some of the stories from this part of the book still shocked me.  Like Trevor says in the book, he couldn't believe that people were so colorblind because of racism.  I couldn't believe it either.  It all sort of reminds me of when Mattel released the "Oreo Fun Barbie" and it somehow didn't occur to anyone that the black version of the doll would be really offensive to a lot of people.

Luckily, SNL was thinking more about the way that people perceive things when they put together this video.  Some people might find this offensive, but others think it's really funny.  Either way, it shows how even when people try to be sensitive about racism, they sometimes still do racist things.

I also really relate to the parts about language because I speak two languages too.  It makes me sad to think about how Babiki felt because she speaks a language that is one of the 11 main languages of the country, but isn't spoken a lot.  That would be so hard.  I'm so lucky to speak more than one language from the time that I was born.