Symeon Brown’s new book, The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain Became Middle Class, reveals a stark truth: even as a black professional class emerges, a significant portion of Black Britain’s working class remains disenfranchised from citizenship, with unresolved Windrush cases serving as a grim reminder. This stratification exposes the racist logic embedded within national borders and the broader European project.
Brown argues that class has been conspicuously absent from conversations about race in Britain. He highlights that black Britons who achieve proximity to power are disproportionately middle class. Yet, despite increased cultural stature and economic capital in politics, music, film, and publishing, Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue occurred simultaneously. Brown states black people in Britain are “hyper-visible, but also, in many cases, disenfranchised,” creating a tension that class analysis could illuminate.
The Illusion of Progress
Britain has seen its first black leader of a major political party, a black chancellor, and a foreign secretary. However, Brown contends this representation has brought remarkably little benefit. He observes that these figures ultimately represent their class interests. David Lammy, for instance, attended a school founded by Henry VIII. Kwasi Kwarteng went to Eton and Oxbridge. Miatta Fahnbulleh, the current cabinet’s only black minister, is privately and Oxbridge-educated. Brown suggests black politicians often require more elite credentials than their white counterparts to reach such positions.
He 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 notes that among black professionals he surveyed, almost one in four had attended a fee-paying school, with 72% of their fees paid outright by parents. This illustrates the limits of symbolic progress when structural inequalities persist.
Dividing the Working Class
Brown’s research, based on interviews with 1,500 members of Britain’s black middle class, found that being black in Britain often leads to an assumption of working-class status. This assumption, he argues, has masked the actual class composition of those closest to power. He also points out that Britain’s discussion of the white working class often flattens reality, ignoring that black and other minority-ethnic working-class people face the same pressures, frequently compounded by racial discrimination. This framing, he warns, can transform shared material problems into a racial contest, pitting struggling groups against each other instead of fostering common interests.
Brown says that in the 1990s, black sensibility held a radical edge, shaped by critiques of corporate behaviour and by anti-apartheid activism. Today, he sees black Britain co-opted by corporate and individualist ideals. He asks, “Because then who has greater proximity to whiteness, Eton-educated Kwasi Kwarteng, or mixed-race Mark Duggan from Tottenham?” This question underscores the complex interplay of race and class, challenging simplistic narratives.
Citizenship Under Threat
The flourishing of a confident black professional culture, Brown insists, is only half 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 states, directly referencing unresolved Windrush cases. This reveals how the border regime operates not just at external frontiers but within national communities, denying fundamental rights and creating internal divisions. As the economic foundations of middle-classness erode for everyone, with three decades of wage stagnation and rising costs, Brown notes the irony: just as black Britain develops a sizable middle class, the middle-class bargain itself begins to unravel. The book is published by Dialogue at £25.