Why is there no black middle class in Britain?

Lucy Alexander:

The phrase “middle class” has always sounded slightly apologetic — indeed, it manages to unite the upper and lower classes in mild derision. Yet it’s a status that many Britons take for granted, with its concomitant rank, comfort, wealth, educational opportunities and aspirations. It’s also almost entirely white. Few of Britain’s black population — over one million and growing — have attained (or wish to attain) middle-class status.

Why? The answer is not as simple as racism, though this is the scapegoat for many in the black community, according to Connie St Louis, presenter of The Black Middle Classes, who interviewed a wide range of black Britons. She believes the problem has almost as much to do with the erosion of black communities. Working-class white Britons may aspire to better themselves, thus eventually becoming middle class, but the same seems not to be true for their black peers, for whom, says St Louis, class labels have little relevance: “Young people don’t aspire to be middle-class, they want to be rich.”

St Louis, 47, a university-educated BBC presenter and magistrate is, without doubt, middle-class, though her parents were Jamaican immigrants who worked on the railways and in factories. So what does middle class really mean? “It’s partly about income, partly about aspiration, partly about education,” says St Louis. “The ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ types who write to the BBC have the power to change things. They are part of a group with the same concerns, so they have a sense of belonging.” In contrast, she believes that the old cohesive working-class communities, both black and white, have disintegrated: “Working-class people have lost interest in social activities such as joining unions — they just look after themselves. They don’t really care about issues, and they feel powerless.”

The potential for social mobility is particularly bleak among young black men, twice as many of whom are in prison as at university. Gang culture and the lack of black male authority figures in homes and classrooms has led to a “disenfranchised group who think the way out is drugs and guns”, says St Louis, which “has huge repercussions for the whole country”. Part of the reason these problems are so far from being resolved, she argues, is because “we miss a middle-class set of black people who can debate these issues with any kind of rigour — we need more than Trevor Phillips and Diane Abbott”.

Although St Louis did find evidence of a growing black middle class, she found it was not proportionally “manifested in society”. The situation is more complicated in America, whose supposedly class-free society many black Britons envy. At first, St Louis says, America seems like a black middle-class paradise. Yet, she believes, tensions lie just beneath the surface. “I think America is deeply racist. You talk to successful black Americans and it’s the same as in Britain — they feel very precarious in their position.”

The biggest barrier to progress alongside racism, St Louis says, is the demise of the supportive black community. “When people do well, they move, which impoverishes the neighbourhoods they leave behind. If middle-class people stayed in Brixton and tried to do something about guns, that would make a difference. Black communities used to do a huge amount of mentoring and caring for each other and that’s being eroded.” St Louis says that her mother’s generation believes the situation is now so bad that “they would have been better off staying in Jamaica”.

Maybe it’s no bad thing that class will never have the same weight for black Britons as for their white neighbours, but if by middle class we mean better jobs and education, and the avoidance of a criminal underclass, the issue takes on more importance. As St Louis says: “People don’t realise the level of unrest in black communities — they ignore society to its detriment.”

Of course, a major reason why there isn't much of a black middle class in Britain is probably due to racial differences in intelligence.