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.
