Marcus Mabry examines Black success in America, working within and against a world of white privilege.

Born and raised in an all-Black enclave in suburban New Jersey, Marcus Mabry suddenly found himself thrust into the white world at age fourteen when he won an academic scholarship to one of the nation's most prestigious prep schools. In examining the price of Black success in America, Mabry recalls what it was like being young, Black, and talented, searching for his own identity, as he teetered uncertainly between two universes: the despairing, impoverished tightly knit black community of his childhood and the white world of privilege and promise that beckoned.

Exploring what it means to be “young, Black, and talented” in America—and the high cost of teetering precariously between two separate worlds—Mabry examines the twentysomething experience, and chronicles the rise of a young Black man—from his ghetto childhood through his Stanford education to his emergence as one of Newsweek's bright, young stars.