White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas
Coming Of Age Black In White America
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mabry, a 27-year-old foreign correspondent for Newsweek, joins the stream of black male memoirists with this diffuse, partly affecting tale of his path from the ghetto to a sometimes precarious place in the white mainstream. It is by now a familiar story, so the challenge is in the telling. Mabry writes fluidly enough about his isolated youth near Trenton, N.J.: ``My grandmother and my encyclopedias were my best friends.'' He cites the help of his self-sacrificing yet self-defeating mother, as well as government aid, as the source of his success. Most of this book, however, concerns Mabry's rewarding but rocky times as a scholarship prep-school student at Lawrenceville (N.J.) and as an undergraduate at Stanford, plus his entree into France and a budding career at Newsweek. Some of his anecdotes are illuminating; for example, his tale of rejection by Stanford blacks and his criticism of ``the galloping paranoia'' against political correctness. However, as he closes his memoir with a scene of reconciliation with his long-estranged father and his struggling brother, it seems Mabry might have waited a bit longer to sort it all into perspective.
