I existed in a space where my mother was a black woman and my father was a white man. And that's how I saw the world. I was just like, some dads are whites and some moms are black. And that's how it is.
Trevor NoahI grew up in a world where authority was female. I never thought to call myself a feminist because of branding. I had this skewed idea of feminist: I thought it meant being a woman who hates men. When I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists, I was like, "Oh, this is what my mom taught me. This is simple. I don't understand why everybody is not this."
Trevor NoahThey said [on a day show], oh, you can't do a Chinese accent. That's - and I said, I'm not doing a Chinese accent. I'm doing my friend's accent. And they said, yeah, you can't do that. And I said, OK, but can I do a Russian accent? And they said, yeah, yeah, of course, you can do that. I said, and a British accent? They said, yeah, go ahead. And I couldn't understand.
Trevor NoahThose were the places where many people mixed if they wanted to mix, which was against the law [Immorality Act of 1927]. My mother was part of that group. My father was part of that group. People who were black and whites and Indian and Asian - and you came together and said, we choose to mix at the risk of being arrested. And so they did.
Trevor NoahI know that in South Africa, we were in that space, and we're still suffering from that space. And that was where a government very successfully convinced the majority of a population that every single person there was blocking the other people from achieving greatness in the country, only to realize that we were all being oppressed at the same time. That's one of the biggest things. And I'm proud to say that.
Trevor Noah