Born a Crime

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. South Africa’s apartheid policy, a system of racial segregation, lasted from 1948 to the early 1990s. What do you know about South African apartheid? Who were the key political figures that were involved? Why did it end?

Teaching Suggestion: This question will equip students with a firm, historically accurate foundation of facts for discussion of the larger theme in Born a Crime of Identity and Race in Apartheid South Africa. Students may have very little knowledge of how apartheid functioned in South Africa. If conversation is slow to start, you can ask some leading questions, such as: Have you ever heard of Nelson Mandela? You may also elect to walk through the following resources together as a class:

• A Stanford University student’s Timeline of Apartheid, part of a class web project titled “Global Perspectives on Human Language: The South African Context”
• History.com’s broad overview of apartheid in “Apartheid in South Africa: Laws, Ends, & Facts”

Differentiation Suggestion: For advanced learners, consider having students draw connections at Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of analysis and synthesis between South African apartheid and racial segregation in the United States. Ask them: What are the similarities? What are the differences? Also ask them to consider how both of these racist policies fit into a larger project of colonialism.

2. Poet Charif Shanahan, who is the son of an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, has called growing up multiracial in America an experience that was rife with “instability.” He explains in this PBS News Hour article: “Instability is the word because there are different ways my body will be read and interpreted depending on who’s looking. . . This creates all sorts of interesting tensions and moments, in a very personal kind of way, of folks being confused, thinking they understand and not understanding.” Consider what Shanahan is saying about the experience of multiracial people, not only in America, but throughout the world. Unpack what Shanahan is suggesting about having a multiracial identity when he refers to his body being “read” by people and by “interesting tensions and moments” and “folks […] thinking they understand and not understanding.”

Teaching Suggestion: Students may offer up their own, personal stories of being multiracial and how their experiences relate to the Shanahan quote. You may also elect to lead the class in a close analysis of this quotation, as a way of guiding a larger conversation on multiracial identity and how it impacts the development of self. For example, Shanahan understands people who are looking at him to be “reading and interpreting” him—as in, trying to make sense of the identifying features and cultural markers that they may see as incongruous. The “interesting tensions and moments” could refer to, for example, when people make assumptions around his identity that are false. Ask students to consider how making assumptions about a person’s identity might lead to “tense and/or interesting” moments.

• In his poem “Trace Evidence,” Charif Shanahan further explores his experience of growing up straddling two cultures.
• “Being Multiracial in America” is a short New York Times documentary featuring Rutgers University students who discuss the joys and challenges of being Americans of multiracial background.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the book.

What languages do you speak? Perhaps you know or are learning a foreign language that is formally studied, such as Spanish, Korean, or Italian; but odds are you also speak an unofficial “language” made up of specific terms based on shared interest and/or cultural understandings. For example, if you’re a soccer player, you probably have a special “language” to talk about the game (specialized soccer terms include stopper, an assist, bicycle kick, and booter); or if you’re a gamer, you also have a special “language” (including terms such as grinding, bots, mods, and glitches).

Teaching Suggestion: To get students thinking about Language as a Cultural Tool, and language as a community-building tool, have them work backward from, first, identifying what communities they are a part of and, second, identifying the specialized, shared “language” they have as a member of those communities.

• A blog post by University of Manchester Professor Yaron Matras titled “Why Embracing Language Diversity is a Key to Community Cohesion” gives an overview of how language serves as one of the main drivers of community.
• To learn more about gamer “language,” students can watch “The Weird & Wonderful Language of Gaming” by popular YouTube channel Name Explain.