[enoint]

One thing that might change your mind is the 20th century mythic cowboy. Where I’m from, maybe 1/4 cowboys were black. So we accepted that as whites-only theatre. Do we have to keep accepting whites-only theatre?

[throwfaraway135]

I think this makes my argument even more true. Imagine you have a budget and want to create a western/cowboy movie. You care about representation and want to have more black cowboys in the movies.

Option A: Take a story with a white cowboy, cast a black guy for him and shoot the movie.

Option B: Find a story of a black cowboy (and as you said there were many of them) and shoot a movie about it.

IMHO option A is patronizing while option B is empowering. Because option A assumes there were no black cowboys, there are no good stories too tell about black people.

[enoint]

Because dime novels were indeterminate about race, it’s not a binary set of options. Those novels relied on dialect rather than physical description.

[throwfaraway135]

I think we agree there are a lot of books which you can make movies about where it is more than reasonable to have a black cowboy protagonist.

And this is the right way to do things, and not by pity race swapping some famous character/historical figure.