‘It’s rare to hear: I’m black and middle class’ – Symeon Brown on black Britain’s enduring ‘taboo’

Black people are more prominent than ever in the UK’s politics and culture. But are they overwhelmingly from the middle class, as Brown argues in his new book? And if so, why isn’t anyone talking about it?

Symeon Brown 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 go on to survey the country’s black professional class more thoroughly than anyone ever had – and who remembers being told by Lammy that he could “never become prime minister, because you sound like where you come from”.

It was 2010, and Brown, interested in politics, was interning for the then Labour backbencher. “And he was right, certainly at the time,” Brown says now.

It’s a small exchange, but it sits at the centre of everything Brown’s new book, The Good, the Black and the Boujee, is trying to work out. What separated the two boys from the same Tottenham streets was class. And class, Brown argues, is the elephant in the room in almost every British conversation about race.

“In the book, I was trying to reconcile two of what seem to be contrary events,” he says, as we chat over Zoom. “On the one hand, Britain’s black population has never had more cultural stature and economic capital – in politics, music, film, publishing – but those same years produced the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol harbour, and black people saying that it is harder than ever to succeed.”