The Good, the Black and the Boujee

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.

Symeon Brown is a reporter and journalist at Channel 4 News and has been hailed as 'the future of journalism' and 'imaginative, original, thoughtful [...] a one off' by Jon Snow. His Guardian long read on the 'Wolves of Instagram' was nominated for a 2019 Orwell Prize and shortlisted for a 2018 British Journalism Award. He won a 2018 Medical Journalists' Association Award for his story on knife crime and the public health crisis facing the major trauma wards in London and was named as one of '30 to Watch' in MHP's Young Journalist Awards.
Symeon has written for a range of publications including Vice, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, CNN, the New Statesman and The Voice. His essay on the commodification of culture in East London was published in Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (ed. Derek Owusu) by Trapeze in 2019.
His first book is Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition & Deceit in the New Influencer Economy (Atlantic, 2022).