Cowboy Cool: A Professional Black Cowboy’s Perspective

Abstract

Everyday embodiments of Black cowboy masculinities are balancing acts that attend to systems of power in racialized spaces. These practices create a space to consider how Black men discuss different ways they understand their positionality in the US hierarchy of racialized patriarchy. This article examines how Black cowboy performances are a balancing act that becomes a conversation about “coolness” as a citational practice. Coolness is also a method with implications for Black male legibility in mainstream country‐western rodeo. For Black cowboys, the definition of “cool” is not textually written to reveal rules or elements for testing. Performance and storytelling—traditional African and African American cultural practices—provide connections to how Black cowboys “play” with positionalities and ideologies of insider/outsider knowledge. This ethnography presents ways that one cowboy communicates how “things aren't always what they seem to be.” It advocates for more humanistic representations of Black masculinity while shifting the narrative frame of unmarked heroes, the cowboys.