My grandfather’s grandfather, Jim Roberts, fought for the Confederacy. This is important because, in ideological terms, the southern rebellion connues to this day. Aſter Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a southerner, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he prudently waited for the reporters to leave before stang, “There goes to south for at least a generaon.” 21 of the 22 senators represenng the eleven states that seceded to join the Confederacy voted against the act while 72 of the 78 senators from the rest of America voted in favor. For generaons, the south was solidly Democrac because Lincoln freed the slaves. Now the South is almost as solidly Republican because Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps the greatest irony of American polical history is that the party of Lincoln has become, in our me, the party of the Confederacy. My father was a second generaon coon farmer who later turned to peanuts. My mother was office manager\bookkeeper for a coon gin that later became a ferlizer plant. Her father owned a machine shop that mostly repaired farm equipment. We were not poor by local standards. I grew up being told that I would go to college. I aended segregated public schools for eight years and remained in public school in the first year of desegregaon while the segregaon academy I aended for my last three years was hasly constructed. Several members of my graduang class were barely literate and most did not connue their educaon. Almost all who did aended the near-by community college. I applied to a small liberal arts college and was accepted. Our Valedictorian was rejected by Auburn based on an ACT score of 16. I remember that score because her anger over being rejected was directed at me. She asked me how I knew things we’d never been taught and I told her that I oſten read for pleasure. Much of what one would assume about me based solely on my birth-nesng within a broadening web of affiliaons would be wrong. Many people do get most of their beliefs by internalizing this web; the social (external) becoming cognive (internal). Most people, for example, are born into the right religion. However, the community of those who have nothing in common beyond being surprisingly unlike what that web would create, if uncrically internalized, is a true minority group. Our difference comes from creang a unique posioning at the intersecon of several cultures not by internalizaon but by juxtaposion, by standing first in one culture to look back into another from the outside and then revising the process. This makes us both insiders and outsiders in every culture we inhabit, both naves and anthropologists wring reports for readers in some second home who may never be at home in the place we describe. If I had to claim some group as "my people", it would be this community of those who have nothing in common. We have no land of our own but can be found everywhere. The distance which Freire sees as essenal in reading both books and the world came naturally to me(Freire, 2008). I am a very extreme introvert. There is a part of me that floats above the stage looking down at the unfolding drama even when I am the protagonist and care deeply about achieving some happy ending. I think that this introversion was a temperamental trait given at birth which strongly influenced what external events taught me to think I knew about myself and my world. My temperament did not dramacally change the life I lived. But, my temperament did change that typical life into something different when considered as a sequence of learning experiences that would shape an identy. I got along well with my peers. I was seen as unusual, perhaps even odd, and did not