The black middle class. That ill-understood, much-pilloried group. A question often asked is whether they are a racial fraction of a class group or a class fraction of a racial group – are we merely talking about middle-class people who are black or black people who are middle class? In any case, little is known about those who fit both categories in Britain. Alas, we have been accustomed to talking about black people and other ethnic minorities as though they belonged to classless “communities”, unlike white Britons, who are riven with class divisions.
Part of the reason, as Symeon Brown notes in The Good, the Black and the Boujee, is that in Britain “to be black is to be assumed to be working class”, thus “race has so often made class differences within black Britain invisible”. Brown sought to correct this view but encountered a dearth of reliable data and research in laying out the complex social and class differentiation among black Britons. So, he had to conduct his own surveys; these, with interviews mixed with reportage and anecdotal storytelling, form the backbone of this informative study.
He doesn’t just claim that there is an increasing number of black people who have typically middle-class jobs, but that there is a black middle class that is beginning to crystalise. One, as he writes with fascination, that has an “unrealised collective potential”.
What Brown is grappling with are two contradictory processes that have marked black Britain for the past decade: the wave of “black excellence” and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Struggle and opportunity exist cheek to cheek. Parallel to the BLM movement was also the most racially diverse government in British historyunder Rishi Sunak and the rise of a black political class. Even though George Floyd was working class, and working-class and poor blacks endure the brunt of police brutality, the changes that resulted from the 2020 awokening “benefitted middle-class and professional blacks mostly”. That is because, as Brown writes, the BLM protests were “an expression of emerging black middle-class aspirations”.
His general thesis is that there indeed is a black British middle class emerging for the first time as a class group within a racial one, rather than vice versa. Although he points out the irony that this group is emerging just as the middle class in general is in serious decline – being squeezed by uber-wealthy elites, which makes the black middle class, who are “employees rather than employers of capital”, a precarious one.
Like any social group, the black British middle class is a complex one, made up of different sub-groups with varying levels of social and cultural capital. Brown identifies a few of its broad groups: a young and rising professional class who come from working-class backgrounds in major cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester; a racially assimilated traditional middle class; and a black elite that is in many cases transnational. Then there is the black petit bourgeoisie, a vector of black nationalism, who are often obsessed with generational wealth to be passed on.
When we speak of the unique “class” system in Britain, we are really referring to something that is a relic of a feudal quasi-caste system rooted in accent, family history and geography – quite different to how Marxists understand class as one’s relationship to the means of production or, as Americans see it, something that can simply be quantified by how big your income is. This is why black footballers (and white ones), even when they earn big money, will not be seen as joining the elite but will still be perceived and treated as working class.
Indeed, one of the virtues of Brown’s book is that it is sensitive to the nuances of race and class in Britain. For example, mixed-race Britons are often lazily portrayed as having relative “privilege” in the social hierarchy because they have a closer “proximity to whiteness”. But that only works when class is considered: it wouldn’t be true of working-class mixed-race Britons who are overrepresented in state care and prison.
One characteristic of the new black middle class is, as Brown notes, that black Britons are now “one of Britain’s most educated groups”. They go to university at higher rates than whites; the GCSE results of African-origin pupils in London rose from 6 per cent below the national average in 2003 to 3 per cent above it now;and black African students have “outperformed white students across the country”: Somali girls, for example, have outperformed white British girls both in and out of London.
To make this more complicated, there is a gender divide that is part of a class divide. As is the case generally, black women are more qualified than men. Which means black men and women are increasingly not in the same social class. As Brown observes, the black British middle class is predominantly female, most of them employed in the public sector, which facilitated this social mobility, while black men are more working class. This class and gender divide means that marriage or “black love” is unusually challenging.
Naturally, any book about black Britain, will involve a compare-and-contrast with black America. Brown is explicit about being “envious” about how black America “knows who its greats are and what its classics are” in contrast to black Britain, which “waits and sees which black figure white gatekeepers ordain”. In large part, this is because black America has a substantial and organised middle class, with its own long-established networks, communal institutions and a clear story of its own ethnogenesis, which binds its members in a way black Britons have not experienced.
Because black Britons are the product of immigration, from a wide range of places, almost all still have some kind of affinity to their parents’ or grandparents’ countries and heritages. In this sense, black Britons are comparable to the white ethnics that passed through Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century who initially retained strong national identities, but then intermarried down the generations.
However, as Brown correctly observes, the ethnic barriers between black Britons are blurrier than they used to be, especially among the professional class and when you go down to the second and third generations. The friction between Africans and Caribbeans is not as potent as it once was; it has mostly been downgraded to ethnic banter. There is a cultural synergy between Africans and Caribbeans that has created a common black culture that soaks in influences from both sides. A Nigerian, a Jamaican and a Somali walking into a bar sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it would also reflect the reality that is the melting pot of black Britishness.
For all his informative research and engaging reportage, Brown writes of the new black middle class as a group who can use their potential of creating intergenerational wealth and institutional clout to build up black Britain to a kind of sub-nation, integrated but not assimilated. Brown adopts a communalist mindset. For instance, he claims that black conservative politicians are the “heirs” to the mixed-race planters and parliamentarians of the 18th century who defended slavery. Some may think this is outrageous, but it is just lame. He notes how normal it is that black politicians can occupy major public offices but don’t have a public commitment to “specific black interests”. But he doesn’t elaborate what these “black interests” are, since different factions will have clashing priorities. The interest of a middle-class black person will be different and even in opposition to that of a working-class black person.
He blames “neoliberal individualism” for leading the black middle class down the path of ethnic particularism rather than the collectivism of multiracial coalition-building. What the connection is between the two is never elaborated. Isn’t ethnic particularism a form of collectivism that hampers individuality? If anything, black Britain could do with some kind of individualism in which people have the courage to go against the orthodoxies of the “community” or “the culture”. A black British “community” led by a black professional vanguard class may benefit that class but, as with the BLM moment in 2020, it won’t empower the black working class.
Instead of hoping that the black middle class will give a leg up to the black working class in the name of some abstract black Atlantic collectivism, a sequel to this book should explore the question of how the black working class can empower itself, take its destiny into its hands and emancipate itself.
The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain Became Middle Class
Symeon Brown
Dialogue, 384pp, £25
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[Further reading: Meet Generation Screwed]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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