Good, the Black and the Bougee

The gospel of black ambition and a landmark portrait of black Britain now. The Good, the Black and the Boujee is a provocative reckoning with how class and gender shape modern black Britain. With archival depth and stylish prose, Symeon Brown profiles the invisible tribes wielding influence in Britain. Whether examining the rise of black Conservative power brokers or tracing the assimilation of a black elite, Brown renders visible the psychological and material cost of class aspiration. Brown has undertaken the largest known data study of the black middle class to reveal what many feel but can't say: the preference of educated black women to be single, the crippling isolation of social mobility and how the triumph of black elites masks the barriers facing the black working class. This is not simply a portrait of a class in motion, but a forensic study of how race, capital and identity entwine - and what's lost, or sometimes found, along the way.