“I’d been forced, since I left you in that driveway six years earlier, to accept I didn’t understand much about any part of the country other than our part of Mississippi.” (Laymon 184)

As Laymon moves up North, he begins to realize a lot of things. To begin, the section Addict Americans starts off with Laymon as a graduate student at 26 years old. His issue with self image worsens throughout the section. He mentions as he travels with his Uncle Jimmy as they go to visit his sick grandmama at the hospital that he was addicted to losing weight. With his body fat at eight percent, he confesses to his grandmama he “loves to lose weight”, further worrying her more. As his grandmama becomes weaker, she asks he “find a real job” to help out his family with bills as they seem to need it more as time progresses.

Laymon decides to get a fellowship and begins teaching at Vassar College. A few semesters in he begins to realize a few things as he works alongside white folks. When he is tasked to mentor Cole, a rich jewish white kid, he realizes that the sole fact of him being white means more than any other quality they may have. It was because of men like Cole that all of his other minority students faced issues of discrimination and had more issues to deal with than men like Cole did. Even though Cole was a dealer of drugs, he simply couldn’t fail because of his whiteness.