“Mr. Friedman pressed play on the VCR. The tape started. It was grainy, black-and-white security camera footage, but you could see what was happening plain as day. They even had it from multiple angles: Me and Teddy reaching through the gate. Me and Teddy racing for the door. They had the whole thing. After a few seconds, Mr. Friedman reached up and paused it with me, from a few meters out, freeze-framed in the middle of the screen. In my mind, this was when he was going to turn to me and say, “Now would you like to confess?” He didn’t. “Trevor,” he said, “do you know of any white kids that Teddy hangs out with?” I nearly shat myself. I looked at the screen and I realized: Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a black and white screen next to a black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera has to pick, it picks me as white. My color gets blown out. In this video, there was a black person and a white person. But still: It was me. The picture wasn’t great, and my facial features were a bit blurry, but if you look closely: It was me. I was Teddy’s best friend. I was Teddy’s only friend. I was the single most likely accomplice. You had to at least suspect that it was me. They didn’t. They grilled me for a good 10 minutes, but only because they were so sure that I had to know who this white kid was. ... At a certain point, I felt so invisible I almost wanted to take credit. I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, “Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!” But of course I didn’t. And they couldn’t. These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them.”
- Excerpts from Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
