Black middle-class Britannia

<p>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'.<br><br>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. <i>Black middle class Britannia</i> 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.</p>