The Re-Fashioning of a False Frontier:
Representations of the Black Cowboy in Contemporary Western Films

 

Hollywood mirrors the social sensibilities of America. As an institution, it creates, re-iterates and subverts cultural discourse by translating it into a form of entertainment. Film culture is a forum for public debate and, as the values of American society ebb and flow, so do those of Hollywood. One outstanding issue faced with Hollywood is its relationship with race and representation. The “Critical Race Theory” provides a cohesive framework for analysing these inequalities. Developed in the 1980s with its background in legal studies, the Critical Race Theory can be summarized as “the theoretical engagement with the centrality of race to humanistic inquiry.” (Raengo, 2016, pg. 6). This refers to the ways African American and black diasporic thought has interacted with western ideology to articulate a specific black philosophical stance. Its central premise is that racism is permanent in America, with black subjugation remaining an ongoing site for struggle. Kevin Wynter focuses on Critical Race theory in the study of Jordan Peele’s film Get out (2017). In his analysis he understands racism as “a pervasive phenomenon embedded in the legal and institutional structures of America that, despite the abolition of explicitly anti-Black laws, continues to ripple diffusely across all areas of social, political, and economic Black life.” (Wynter, 2022, pg. 12). In its history, Hollywood has abided by its own additional set of laws called the Hays Code, enforced in 1934 to the late 1940s, that underpinned racist ideologies shared nationwide through censorship such as the prohibiting of miscegenation. Although these rules are no more, Hollywood's ethos is still underlined by the code’s language; recent tumultuous political events, experienced not only in America but globally, have extenuated the importance of acknowledging the critical race theory within film studies.  


In this essay, I will be focusing on the intersection of fashion, race and representation within film through analysing the styling of the Black cowboy in contemporary Hollywood westerns. As a preface to my analysis, I have consciously used the term ‘black cowboy’ instead of ‘African American cowboy’ where appropriate. The reasoning for such is the thought that by using African American to encapsulate an archetype, there is an implied exclusion and othering of the black experience to those not born to/emigrated to America. As the Western is a genre not just localised or associated to people of the west, it seems inappropriate to imply this experience is only applicable by ethnic grouping. Appropriately, ‘black’ can encompass a universal shared experience through race, exclusive not just to those born to/associated with America, but all those who consider themselves black. Additionally, this essay will mainly focus on the fashions of the male cowboy to maintain the relevance of the references analysed. However, the importance of the female influence in the western genre is a topic I believe should have a lot more attention and focus and hopefully the completion of this study will give it space to do so.  


Genre in cinema used to categorise and commercialise mainstream Hollywood films through providing familiarity in repeated situations, stories and characters (Neale, 2000). One of the most famous genres, crucial in establishing the national identity of America, is the western. Typically, a western follows a story of the outlaw, a stranger that comes to town, with its visual cues found through rugged and gritty aesthetics. The celebrated golden age of the Hollywood western spanned across 30 years between the release of Stagecoach in 1939 to The Wild Bunch in 1969. They were typically set west of the Mississippi in the age of the new frontier (around 1865-1900) - an era that shared sympathies with American society post-World War II (Coyne, 1998, pg. 5). A broad sub-genre is the spaghetti western – a term for low budget westerns typically filmed in Europe but with American actors (Frayling, 1980). These were produced mostly during the 1960s and became a cult classic amongst film fans for their loveable campness. The Western offered its audience a social and political alternative rooted in the idea of the American Empire but commonly fails to interrogate the colonial ideology that came with the Westward expansion and the establishment of the new frontier. They mirror the “persistent nagging doubt in American life about whether the choice which America made to become great, capitalist, industrial power was indeed a wise one” (Nachbar, 1974) and, in a way, reject the issues with modern American life through formulated mythological representations of other destinies. The flourishing of the western has been permitted by its economic domination, with its basic elements being easily interchanged thousands of times to manufacture a captivating production that is reliant on one thing: the cowboy as the embodiment of myth.  


The archetypal cowboy is a handsomely rugged white male, independently travelling cross country by asserting himself (when necessary or not) through heroic violence. This myth is a self-actualised fallacy of “manifest destiny”, a belief that the white man’s right was to settle Westward by conquering and abolishing native communities. Revisionist historians have challenged this whitewashed archetype of the cowboy and have estimated that one in four cowboys were black (Helmore, 2019). Infact, the term ‘cowboy’ is thought to have stemmed from the derogative name for enslaved cow-handlers with “Boy” was used pejoratively in place of the more respectable “hand”. When white Americans seeking cheap land began moving westward in the early 19th century, they often brought with them enslaved individuals that made up nearly 25 percent of the settler population. Cattle herding and maintaining land were central to this demographic and post-civil war, the lack of railroads meant there was large demand for men that know how to wrangle horses across the frontier (Nodjimbadem, 2017). These cowboys were semi-nomadic and they moved through the vast landscapes from town to town. Modernization eventually pushed them out from their nomadic lifestyle and through that process, the black cowboy was wiped from the history books of the Western Frontier.  


Contemporary cinema is reclaiming the whitewashed narratives of Hollywood Westerns through challenging stereotypes that uphold white supremacist values. Recent advancements in critical race theory, pushed by the Black Lives Matter movement and NAACP, have challenged the validity of race neutrality, meritocracy, and colour-blindness in social and professional contexts (Wynter, 2022). Today, the accessibility of visual media has established the entertainment industry to be at the forefront of culture, with Hollywood films being used as reflections of the times in which they are made and with a rise in racial consciousness, has established that representation plays a critical role in shifting how racial order is presented (Smith, 2013, pg.780). Concrete Cowboy (2021) is a great example of rejecting the fictionalised racial dominance in horse wrangling by dramatizing the story of the Fletcher Street Riding Community of Philadelphia. Directed by Ricky Stuab, the story surrounds Cole (Caleb McLaughlin) that at 15 is expelled from school and sent to stay with his estranged horse wrangling father, Harp, (Idris Elba) in North Philadelphia. Harp is a key member of the community’s stable where they tend, house and ride their horses. Scene by scene, the complexities of affiliation challenge Cole's sense of belonging and eventually, he finds solace in the stables of Fletcher Street and submits to the life of a cowboy.  


The movies poignancy lies in its representative value. In the long history of westerns, Concrete Cowboy could arguably be seen as the most accurate depiction of contemporary cowboy fashion, as it is made in partnership with actual cowboys. In an intimate scene, the stable’s community gather around a fire and swap stories of the century-long history of the black riders in Philadelphia. Here, oral histories previously condescended by Hollywood are given the platform to rewrite social discourse around the African American experience in horse wrangling. The movie’s partnership with real members of the Fletcher Street Riding community, two of who are actually casted in the film - Jamil Prattis and Ivannah Mercedes support the strength of its representation. Although it was very hard to find any information on the styling choices of the movies costumer (Jessica Bergstrom), the stressed importance by the production team for the story to be as accurately representative of the rider's experience makes me believe that this was also encompassed by the costumes. Figure 1 and 2 shows the comparison between the real cowboys of Fletcher Street vs the fictionalised ones. There are many similarities that tie the two together. Arguably, the most significant styling feature is the amalgamation of casual urban fashion and western memorabilia where jeans, vests and T-shirts blur the pre-empted boundary of between civilian and cowboy. An important plot line of the film focuses on a pair of Nike Jordans (Figure 3) that is given to Cole as a gesture of affiliation with Smush, a long-lost friend that is caught up in the gang culture of the city. In the scene where Cole empties out the stables for the first time, he is irritated after dirtying up his sneakers after dropping horse manure on them. It is an important moment where sneakerhead customs attributed to black culture intersects with Hollywood western establishing a section of contemporary fashion into the genre’s zeitgeist. This, along with the donning of the Stenson hat and/or bandana, adapt the characters to African American experience of modern horse wrangling and through representation, establish them as the contemporary Black cowboy.

The Harder they fall (2021) is an example of the fictionalized Black cowboy’s fashion. Directed by Jaymes Samuel, the film is an exciting corrective to the whitewashed depictions of Hollywood’s wild west. The movie doesn't simply recite history but instead rewrites iconography. The movie opens with a black screen and the text, “While the events of this story are fictional ... These. People. Existed.” (The Harder They Fall, 2021, 0:11-0:22) to intentionally bring to the audience's attention their own uneducated bias. The characters are based off real African American figures that existed in the western frontier, including Nat Love, Rufus Buck, Stagecoach Mary and Bill Picket (Figure 4). The story follows Nat Love’s quest for revenge against Rufus Buck and when he discovers his enemy is being released from prison, he gathers his gather to track Rufus down. The story has all the characteristics of a typical western. Cowboys ride across empty landscapes to be met with animosity in towns that they are strangers, and, in its slight silliness, garish violence is wiped off with a quick-witted script. It could be described as stylish instead of substantial, but it successfully reclaims all areas that blackness has been erased in Hollywood’s wild west.   


Costume in this film questions what the classic cowboy looked like but successfully complies with its mythology. Post-modern sensibilities towards the western genre have pushed costume designers to interrogate the presumed reality of western wear. This is not a new school of thought, Howard Hawks Red River (1947) committed itself to a new standard of realism that was based in its actors clothing. However, if we analyse this through Critical Race Theory, we can understand that this realism was based off an incomplete whitewashed narrative of the past. The stereotypical depiction of the cowboy fails to consider the nuance of nature and culture, with the blending of the two producing an amalgamation of a mythical being, for example, the lone ranger who is naturally bred with to feel comfortably cool wearing leather in the scorching hot desert. The effect is the loss in temporal difference between Hollywood myth and lived reality. Just as Roland Barthes reflected, the effect of the supposedly ‘real’ has censored a large aspect of candid clothing worn by the underrepresented in that time (Gaines and Herzog, 1998).  


The costume designer for the film was Antoinette Messam who used the book ‘The Black West’ (1971) by William Loren Katz as a strong point of reference for the film (Cochrane, 2021). The book was one of the first to address the absence of black history in the westward expansion of the United States. It involves a large selection of pictorial history serving as a rich resource in the visual style of the real black cowboy, and as Messam reflects in conversation with the Guardian, “they all had their own individual style,” (Cochrane, 2021). In Their essay ‘The Fantasy of Authenticity in Western Costume’, Gaines and Herzog identify the predominant figures in the west that would have each contributed components to its fashioning. The “Indian Brave, Mexican vaquero, Civil War soldier, US cavalryman, cattleman, horse wrangler, and gambler.” (Gaines and Herzog, pg.177) all source the fashions of the stereotypical cowboy and, bit by bit, we can deconstruct the puzzle of references to understand the aesthetic convolution the character. Messam acknowledged the multi-cultural history of the American Frontier by absorbing different aspect into their costumes. For example, Stagecoach Mary (Figure 5) can be seen with a large turquoise and silver necklace strung around her neck - a nod to the influence of Native American communities that play a significant role within Western America. Therefore, although The Harder They Fall is a fictionalised tale of the African American cowboy, through its self-aware challenge to the biases of the past, it is a successful re-fashioning of the assumed purity of frontier and establishes the black cowboy not only as character in Hollywood, but a figure in history.  

I would finally like to introduce a film that is initiating the establishment of the black cowboy’s fashion across genres. NOPE (2022), directed by Jordan Peele, is arguably one of the most important representations of the Black cowboy as it intersects not only race, representation and blackness, but also the issues of such in movie making itself. Peele’s reliance on “myth and lore that fills the Western landscape with the history of the cinema” (Brody, 2022) merges the flick into a sort of sci-fi western that responds to a range of societal issues based in and around the film industry in California. Essentially, it is a movie made about movie making's exploitative tendencies and deficient relationship with representation. In a short synopsis, the Haywood's ranch is constantly taunted by an unsuspecting ominous UFO, one that blends into the sky as a cloud. The brother and sister pair are stranded there with no way of proving its ill intent until a well-established movie maker exploits their need for validity. The film's theme of exploitation is set in stone by a line delivered by Emerald to a working studio team, saying: "From the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game.". She is referring to her grandad, Alistor E. Haywood, the fictionalized name given to the black jockey featured in the first ever moving image "The Horse in Motion" by Edward Muybridge. The consequence of this historical context becomes more sinister as the plot unravels.

As most of Peele's films do, it tackles the African American experience through emerging the audience in fantasy and reality that leaves them ill at ease due to the reality of its topic. The reason this film is important to study when determining the fashions of the contemporary black cowboy is because the film itself is a metaphor for the treatment of such in Hollywood. OJ Haywood embodies this. As the grandson of the first ever on-screen cowboy, questions of representation open a discussion around blackness in Hollywood. I believe that Peele is communicating that OJ has claim to be not only an authentic cowboy, but the original one; which is reinforced when his wrangling skills ultimately show him as heroic cowboy trope we are all used to. The climax of the film involves OJ on his horse luring in the UFO through a series of ploys in order to get a shot of it on camera. It unravels like a true show-down and we experience the exhilaration of a typical wild western duel. In this scene, OJ’s blue jeans seem to be an ode to the historical relationship between horse wrangling and denim. On his top he wears a garishly orange crew hoodie (Figure 6) for the movie “The Scorpion King”, a nod to real fashion of the Compton Cowboys that Kaluuya trained with in preparation for shooting (Cartter, 2022. The Compton Cowboys were an important reference for the movie, not just for costume, but also the notion of what they stood for. They are a case study for questioning the racial biases of horse wrangling; with the juxtaposition in stereotypes associated with Compton and the equestrian world. The representation of the hoodie asks the audience to challenge their preconceived notions of what the typical ‘cowboy’ looks like.

  

However, there is one point of reference I would like to draw your attention to that reminds us to not forget the frontrunners of such when interrogating preconceptions of black cowboy. In the final scene when Emerald becomes the heroine, she is wearing a yellow bandana (Figure 7). I believe this is a refence William ‘Bill’ Pickett, pioneer of “bulldogging” and first popularised representation of the Black cowboy (Figure 8). Born in 1870, Pickett travelled around the world in Rodeo shoes and appeared in early motion pictures that depicted the Wild West. After his death in 1932, he became the first African American cowboy to be inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1972 and even appeared on a U.S. postage stamp in the 1990’s (Strain, 2023). It is significant to consider his role in the representation of African Americans in the wild west as he could be considered as the only black cowboy featured historically in popular culture. Therefore, many depictions of the black cowboy we see in earlier westerns would’ve been based of Bill as a caricature. The lack of diversity within that sphere has pigeon-holed social construction around the depictions of horse wranglers. So perhaps this yellow bandana was a nod to Bill Picketts notarized value in the field of black history.  


In conclusion, the resurgence of the Black cowboy narrative in contemporary Hollywood Westerns marks a significant shift in the representation of race, fashion, and historical accuracy. Critical Race Theory provides a vital lens to analyse these representations, highlighting how systemic racism persists in Hollywood's storytelling. Films like Concrete Cowboy, The Harder They Fall, and NOPE challenge the traditionally whitewashed cowboy archetype by showcasing authentic African American experiences and incorporating cultural influences into costume and narrative. Through intentional styling choices, filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Jaymes Samuel blend historical accuracy with modern aesthetics by embracing cultural representations of African American fashions. From Cole’s Nike Jordans in Concrete Cowboy to Stagecoach Mary’s Native American-inspired jewellery in The Harder They Fall, costumes reflect the intersection of urban fashion and Western iconography. These choices celebrate the legacy of Black cowboys while addressing their historical erasure. By reframing the Western genre with racial consciousness, these films encourage audiences to confront ingrained biases and acknowledge the diverse realities of the American West. The renewed visibility of the Black cowboy in cinema serves as a powerful testament to African American cultural influence and reinforces the importance of reclaiming Black histories through film.