Britain's black political class is overwhelmingly middle-class, privately educated, and Oxbridge-trained — yet the country still talks about black Britons as a single, undifferentiated group. That's the central argument of Symeon Brown's new book, The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain Became Middle Class, which surveyed 1,500 members of Britain's black professional class and found that those closest to power are disproportionately elite.
Brown, home affairs correspondent at Channel 4 News, says he and Foreign Secretary 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 recalls Lammy telling him sixteen years ago, 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."
The Elite Credentials Gap
Brown says Britain's changing face is most visible in politics, but 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. Lammy was educated at a school founded by Henry VIII. Kwarteng went to Eton and Oxbridge. 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.
Among black professionals he surveyed, 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. 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. Brown says the muted response among some black and leftwing voters to Lammy's departure from government illustrated the limits of symbolic progress.
The Taboo Question
Brown says he was trying in the book to reconcile two contrary events: Britain's black population has never had more cultural stature and economic capital in politics, music, film and publishing, but those same years produced the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of Edward Colston's statue into Bristol harbour, alongside black people saying that it's harder than ever to succeed. He says black people in Britain are "hyper-visible, but also, in many cases, disenfranchised," and that creates a tension because class has been missing from conversations about race.
Not everyone was pleased that he went looking. "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 was that being black and middle class doesn't mean being as privileged as being white and middle class. "That may be true, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't interrogate it," he adds.
"It's very rare to hear someone say, 'I'm black and middle class,' in Britain," Brown 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 don't always point the same way, and that the middle class has always been fragmented.
A New Professional Culture
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". 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.
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's part of an emerging, often young, black professional class that hasn't assimilated into the frameworks of white cultural sensibilities. 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. "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," he says.
The Stratification Problem
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's 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. 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.
Why This Matters:
Brown's findings challenge the assumption that racial representation in politics automatically translates into material progress for working-class communities. The fact that Britain's black political elite is disproportionately privately educated and Oxbridge-trained suggests that class barriers may be as significant as racial ones in determining who reaches positions of power. The survey's finding that 72% of black professionals who attended fee-paying schools had their fees paid outright by their parents points to intergenerational wealth accumulation that's rarely acknowledged in public discourse. The stratification of black Britain — with a confident professional class emerging alongside persistent disenfranchisement in working-class communities — mirrors broader economic divides across British society. Brown's observation that the middle-class bargain itself is eroding after three decades of wage stagnation and rising costs applies regardless of race, suggesting that shared material interests may be obscured by identity-focused political narratives.