Symeon Brown says Britain’s black population has never had more cultural stature and economic capital in politics, music, film and publishing, yet those same years also produced the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol harbour. That’s the contradiction at the centre of his new book, The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain Became Middle Class. Brown argues that class has been missing from conversations about race, even as black Britons who come closest to power are disproportionately middle class.
Power, access and the old gatekeepers
Brown’s own story runs straight through Britain’s class machinery. He says he and David Lammy went to the same primary school in Tottenham, north London. One went on to a selective secondary school and became the second black person to hold one of Britain’s great offices of state. The other became a journalist who would later survey the country’s black professional class more thoroughly than anyone ever had. Brown also recalls Lammy telling him in 2010, when Brown was interning for the then Labour backbencher, that he could “never become prime minister, because you sound like where you come from”. Brown says: “And he was right, certainly at the time.”
Brown says he interviewed about 1,500 members of Britain’s black middle class about their education, employment, families, aspirations, spending, social values and class. Some questions, he says, felt taboo within the community, including why middle-class black Britons tend to date white people. His findings, he says, show that to be black in Britain is so often to be assumed to be working class, and that this assumption has masked how black Britons who come closest to power are actually, disproportionately, middle class.
He says not everyone welcomed the inquiry. “Bona fide black elites don’t like the idea of this book,” he says. Some people stopped returning his calls once they heard what he was working on. “People felt it was going to be an exposé,” he says. The objection, he says, was that being black and middle class does not mean being as privileged as being white and middle class, but he adds: “That may be true, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t interrogate it.”
Brown says Britain is obsessed with talking about class and allergic to admitting it has any issue with it. “It is very rare to hear someone say, ‘I’m black and middle class,’ in Britain,” he says. “The most common response I got from interview requests was: ‘Thanks, but I’m not middle class.’” He says class itself is nebulous and mercurial, with economic and cultural dimensions that do not always point the same way, and that the middle class has always been fragmented.
Representation without relief
Britain’s changing face, Brown says, is most visible in politics. He says Britain has had its first black leader of a major political party, a black chancellor and foreign secretary, but that representation has brought remarkably little benefit. “Ultimately, these people are representing their class interests,” he says. He names David Lammy, Kwasi Kwarteng and Miatta Fahnbulleh, saying Lammy was educated at a school founded by Henry VIII, Kwarteng went to Eton and Oxbridge, and Fahnbulleh, the current cabinet’s only black minister, is privately educated and Oxbridge-educated. Brown says black politicians actually have to have more elite credentials than white candidates.
He says Lammy was raised by a single mother in Tottenham after his father left the family, attended the state-funded King’s School in Peterborough, then went to university in London and Harvard Law School. Among black professionals he surveyed, Brown says, almost one in four had attended a fee-paying school at some point, and 72% of them had their fees paid outright by their parents. He says the muted response among some black and leftwing voters to Lammy’s departure from government illustrated the limits of symbolic progress.
Brown says black Britain has become co-opted by corporate and individualist ideals. He says that in the 1990s there was a radicalism to black sensibility, shaped by criticism of corporate behaviour and by parents and friends galvanised by the anti-apartheid movement. Outside politics, he says, conversations that are supposedly about race are often about class. He recalls debates from the heyday of Black Twitter about “proximity to whiteness” and asks: “Because then who has greater proximity to whiteness, Eton-educated Kwasi Kwarteng, or mixed-race Mark Duggan from Tottenham?”
A stratified Britain, not a single story
On dating, Brown says people primarily date class before race. He says black women are more likely to be middle-class professionals than black men, and that many women told him: “I’ve got this level of professional success, I’ve hit these particular class markers, but I can’t find a man who also equals this on the terms that I want.”
Brown says he grew up in the 1990s in a terraced house on the edge of Tottenham’s once notorious Broadwater Farm estate, which he describes as “a hub of grime, street life and black radicalism”. He says his parents were both second-generation British-Jamaicans, his father was a “career criminal” and his mother a childcare worker. He describes early years in social housing, when his mother delivered the Yellow Pages for extra cash. He started his professional life as an assistant archivist at the Black Cultural Archives, then joined the Guardian as a researcher on a Scott Trust bursary, and later moved to Channel 4 News, where he is now home affairs correspondent.
Brown says he now operates in a decidedly middle-class milieu, but when asked about his own class status he laughs and says: “Everyone always wants to ask me that!” He describes himself as “multi-class” and says: “I’ll never really be read as middle class, because of my accent and other things.” He says he is part of an emerging, often young, black professional class that hasn’t assimilated into the frameworks of white cultural sensibilities. He says he can be found at book launches populated by the “black literati” and at festivals such as Detty December in Nigeria and Paris’s Fête de la Musique, describing it as a “middle-class cultural life driven by black cultural products”.
The Cambridge sociologist Ali Meghji says black middle-class identity in Britain tends to take one of three forms: those who don’t see racism as a significant issue and feel a stronger affinity with people of the same class; those who strategically code-switch to match white middle-class taste; and those who deliberately steer their cultural life towards black diasporic culture. Brown says he and many of his subjects fit the third category. He says the black literati are full of gossip, drama and internecine fighting, and adds: “There’s so much beef within the black literati, you wouldn’t believe.” He says: “When I go to a book launch, I don’t want to drink warm wine and eat cheese. I want to turn up, hear some bashment, dancehall and soca.”
Brown says the flourishing of this confident black professional culture is only one half of the story. “We’ve never had a greater cohort of black people with this level of cultural or economic capital, but we still have a huge working class that is also, in some cases, disenfranchised from citizenship,” he says, pointing to unresolved Windrush cases. He says black Britain has become more stratified even as the country continues to talk about it as though it were a single, undifferentiated group.
He says Britain’s talk about the white working class also flattens reality, because black and other minority-ethnic working-class people face the same pressures, often compounded by racial discrimination. He says the label can turn shared material problems into a racial contest, inviting struggling groups to see one another as rivals rather than people with common interests.
Brown says the economic foundations of middle-classness are shifting beneath everyone’s feet after three decades of wage stagnation and rising costs. “If we think about what it means to be middle class, whatever your race, at this moment in time,” he says, “it means to be poorer, less influential, and doing work of lesser stature than 30 years ago.” He says the irony is that just as black Britain has developed a sizable middle class and a culture distinctly its own, the middle-class bargain itself is beginning to fall apart. The book is published by Dialogue at £25.