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Humanitarian NGOs receive wide support from donors, policymakers, and diplomats, despite a lively scholarly debate about their effectiveness and ethical grounding. How did the humanitarian NGO sector attain such an unusually trusted status? The introduction examines this question in light of existing work on the history and sociology of humanitarian work. It focuses on the central role religion has played in long-distance humanitarian projects, and highlights the mid-nineteenth-century as a key turning point in the development of the humanitarian NGO sector. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and on the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, the introduction argues that the humanitarian NGO sector achieved its prominent international status through a set of cultural and religious processes occurring in the second half of the nineteenth-century.

In this chapter I argue there are three modes of Black middle class identity, which individuals towards each identity mode adopting specific cultural repertoires. Firstly is the identity mode labelled strategic assimilation. Here, individuals adopt repertoires of code switching and cultural equity; they switch identities when around the White middle class, and strive to consume dominant cultural capital to achieve a cultural equity with White middle class people. Secondly, there are those towards the ethnoracial autonomous identity mode. They reject the strategy of code switching through their repertoire of browning, and through their repertoire of Afro-centrism they prioritise consuming cultural forms which give positive representations of Black diasporic histories, knowledges, and identities. Lastly are those towards the class-minded identity mode. They adopt repertoires of post-racialism – arguing that we are ‘beyond racism’ – and de-racialisation, seeing themselves as ‘middle class’ rather than Black.

This chapter outlines the book’s aims to analyse how racism and anti-racism influence Black middle class cultural consumption. It begins by summarising the colourblind literature on the middle class, which I argue limits our overall understanding of how middle class identity and culture are racialised. I then review the literature on the White and Black middle classes, before positioning the book in relation to these streams of research. The triangle of Black middle class identity is then sketched out, where I argue there are three Black middle class identity modes – strategic assimilation, ethnoracial autonomous, and class-minded – each showing a different relationship between racism, anti-racism, and cultural consumption.