‘That black boy’s different class!’: a historical sociology of the black middle-classes, boundary-work and local football in the British East-Midlands c.1970−2010

Abstract

Seldom has leisure as a cultural activity been used to examine the boundary-work and lived realities of black middle-class men in the UK. Drawing on ethnographic data taken from a three-year study of one East-Midlands based African-Caribbean founded football club c.1970-2010, the article addresses these points. It widens existing knowledge on the British black middle-classes in three ways. (1) It indicates that the emergence of the black middle-classes in Leicester is discontinuous, and connected to wider social policies designed to improve the effectiveness of front-line services and pacify urban black youth in the 1980s. (2) Using Lacy’s black Lower and Upper middle-class (BLMC and BUMC) schemata, the paper sketches-out the boundary-work which exist between the club’s black working-class and BLMC and BUMC members, and between the BLMC and BUMC men within the club. (3) That sport possesses its own class-dimensions which further divided black men in Leicester during this period.