Changing language changed the encounter

Noah recalls using several South African languages to move among groups that might first read him through racial appearance. Answering in another person’s language could interrupt that first classification and establish a different kind of social belonging.

The episodes are his firsthand recollections, not controlled evidence that multilingualism reliably dissolves prejudice. Their mechanism is social and bounded: language can signal shared context before biography is known. Under a system deliberately built to separate people, code-switching offered some flexibility, but it did not remove the laws or power behind the categories.