Black middle-class Britannia : identities, repertoires, cultural consumption

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism affects Black British middle-class cultural consumption.

In doing so, it challenges the dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, Meghji argues that there are three modes of black middle-class identity: strategic assimilation, ethnoracial autonomous, and class-minded.

Individuals within each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption.

Those employing strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital.

Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of ‘browning’ and Afro-centrism, self-selecting traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’ while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures.

Lastly, class-minded individuals draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation, polarising between ‘Black’ and middle-class cultural forms.

Black middle class Britannia examines how such individuals display an unequivocal preference for the latter, lambasting other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated. -- .