The good, the black and the boujee: how black Britain became middle class
Speakers
Join us for a discussion about a new book, The Good, the Black and the Boujee.
A landmark portrait of modern Britain, The Good, the Black and the Boujee is a critical reckoning with the pursuit of ‘black excellence’. From broadcasters and lawyers to content creators, actors and politicians, black professionals appear to have become leaders of Britain’s most visible, profitable and culture-defining industries. Yet educated black professionals say racism is entrenched and rising to the top has never been harder. Symeon Brown unravels the web of class and gender that shapes black Britain today, reconciling cultural and political conversations surrounding black British identity with the present reality. Whether dissecting the preference of educated black women to be single, the rise of black Conservative power brokers, or how the assimilation of black elites masks the barriers facing the black working class, Brown renders visible the psychological and material cost of class aspiration. This event will explore how race, capital and identity entwine – and what is lost, gained and discovered through social mobility.
Meet our speakers and chair
Symeon Brown is the Home Affairs correspondent on Channel 4 News and a reporter on Unreported World. Symeon's reporting has won or been shortlisted by the Orwell Prize, the British Journalism Awards, the Criminal Justice Association, the Medical Journalists’ Association and the Sandford St Martin Awards. He was senior researcher on The Guardian and LSE study into the 2011 England Riots. He is the author of Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy.
Aamna Mohdin is the Guardian’s first community affairs correspondent, reporting on the social, political, and economic experiences of UK communities, with a focus on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. She spent her early years in the Kakuma refugee camp before arriving in the UK aged seven. Her book Scattered was published by Bloomsbury in 2024. She won the British Journalism Award 2022 and her work on the Guardian’s Cotton Capital investigation received a British Press Award 2024.
Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society within UCL’s Faculty of the Arts and Humanities, and a faculty associate of the UCL Sarah Parker Redmond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and Professor in Practice at the British Film Institute (BFI).
Coretta Phillips is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy. She joined the Department of Social Policy in 2001, and her research interests lie in the field of race, ethnicity, crime, criminal justice and social policy. Since 2022, her major research efforts have focused on a multi-disciplinary ESRC project providing the first systematic, comprehensive and historically grounded account of the crime and criminal justice experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in England since the 1960s.
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