Growing up in a predominantly White community, during the 1970s and ‘80s, Jennifer Mabry’s identity is formed in her individuality, not as part of a larger ethnic group. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she proves herself meritorious, particularly in the performing arts. When she leaves home to attend a historically Black college in the Deep South, she begins to learn about the racial and social politics of Black identity in America. When she transitions from college coed to young career woman, her estimable talent and intelligence are not armor enough to shield her from the impenetrable racism and sexism scorched into society’s white collar workforce. There was no indication, growing up, that Mabry’s Black middle class entitlement was any different than White middle class entitlement. As an adult, she discovers there is a difference. While many Americans are familiar with the great migration of Black citizens from the South to Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, during the middle of the twentieth century, the literature chronicling the Black migration west to the Rockies, Pacific Northwest, and northern California, where Black people are a fraction of the general population, during the same era, is scarce. And there are few narratives in our nation’s literary canon about the lives of Black girls growing up in the western United States. Fighting To Be Seen is a coming-of-age memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, about how Black identity is neither static nor easily defined. About the complexity of lived experiences of Black Americans in a world that views American identity as “White.” And about one Black woman’s struggle to make peace with her identity, issues surrounding race, and the effects of growing up middle class in an all-White community in the Rocky Mountains at the height of integration.