Caille Millner aspires to sing a song of herself that contains multitudes. As an African-American journalist who grew up among working-class Latinos then among affluent whites, studied at Harvard, and lived in the Bay Area, Boston, Brooklyn, and South Africa, the 27-year-old Ms. Millner has traversed class, race, and geography. Both social analysis and bildungsroman, her memoir “The Golden Road: Notes on my Gentrification” (Penguin Press, 256 pages, $22.95) is a meditation on the complexities of upward mobility in America.

As a 12-year-old, Ms. Millner moves from a predominantly Chicano community in San Jose to the “hushed, tree-lined neighborhood” of Almaden Valley. Friendless, out of place, and one of the few black students at her school, she turns, “without irony,” to books, television, and the movies for advice on “what type of self” she ought to fashion for herself. Very soon, she chooses to remain seated during each morning’s Pledge of Allegiance, reading Malcolm X and Richard Wright.

Isolation begets a precocious awareness, and she begins to observe, to narrate, and to develop a standpoint on her environs. She decides that she must create both a public and a private self, “wholly separate and wholly exclusive,” in order to survive. She determines that she must choose one ethnic culture, or risk rootlessness. “This is not,” she writes, “an idle choice for people of color in America.”

Ms. Millner conveys a strikingly moral point of view, socially aware, and fiercely consistent. As she moves through diverse geographies, she worries again and again about what upward mobility and gentrification do to the authenticity of communities and to the self. Her prose — cadenced, forceful, anaphoric — is at its best when expressing her urgency:

For two and a half years they had thwarted me. By they I meant the school’s staff, administration, and students, but I also meant a larger and more overarching force that I could feel but not articulate. I meant the blind but not benign eye that America turns to race. I meant the pointed way in which the people of my neighborhood spoke of plummeting property values and bad influences and cultural differences when they spoke of busing or crime or drugs.

Here Ms. Millner uses a rhythmic, oratorical style that sometimes wears thin in the book. The ancient critic Longinus noted that such repetition has the effect of a “swift succession of blow on blow.”

Ms. Millner conflates her own upward mobility with that of the communities in which she lives. When sojourning in South Africa, she fights against the gentrification of one of its towns and imagines that “if Bo-Kaap could remain, then perhaps [she] could endure as well.” But gentrification is rarely so complete an evil, and when she falls short of her mission in Bo-Kaap, her disappointment parallels feelings about her personal successes and compromises.

There are times when Ms. Millner seems to go too far in making of her life a microcosm of a greater problem. When she calls her experience of high school exclusion a “quintessentially American story that reveals our serious subterranean fears about power and access and, of course, about race,” she draws too much of the general from the personal. No woman is an island, but neither is a woman every island. Ms. Millner’s drive toward generalization occasionally obscures the underlying person. Reading that she learns “to participate in national innocence through collective delineation,” I wanted her to dig more of herself from underneath the heap of cultural theory.

Reading a memoir, one looks for the story of another person, another life. The glimpses we do get of the person here are intriguing. Ms. Millner says she has created a life in which she can “hide behind a pen” partly because she is “struck dumb when confronted with racism.” Passing mentions are made of her eating disorders, of drug use, and of misery so crippling as to leave her curled up on her bedroom floor. Characters such as a father figure in South Africa and an English boyfriend are briefly discussed, barely developed, then dropped, without the reader’s understanding why they were brought up at all.

“I have always been obsessed with stories,” Ms. Millner writes, but she seems more interested in arguing her perspective on the complications of class and race than in telling a story. Meanwhile, her arguments make up part of her song, and in those she has surely succeeded.

Ms. Kwon is a writer living in New York.