I watched Peacock’s High Horse: The Black Cowboy with dust on my boots and the kind of soreness that tells you the lesson took. Earlier that day, I met my new mustang for the first time, walking up to her with healthy anxiety, joy, tenderness and a lot of respect. She stood there, quiet, curious and steady, as if she had all the time in the world. I fell in love with her mind — and her questions.
That same day, Andrea, my trainer, had me working on steady low hands, a deep seat and quiet legs while loping — a brisk jog. These fundamentals don’t look dramatic from the bleachers, but they change everything for you and the horse. In years of lessons at the practice barn, I’ve learned that confidence can’t be faked; a thousand pounds of animal will call your bluff every time.
The honesty and clarity that come from working with horses is why this three-part docuseries landed with such force for me. High Horse reminds you that in the Western United States, Black hands have always been on the reins, breaking horses, moving cattle, riding fences, racing and training. The problem is not that Black cowboys are being added to the West’s familiar story; the problem is that the country keeps acting surprised to see them.
The series — executive produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and directed by Jason Perez, an independent filmmaker mentored by Spike Lee — stitches stunning archival footage and photographs with present-day scenes of Black cowboy life, traveling through film, music and marketing history to show that the way the story of the West gets told isn’t always the way it plays out in real life. History gets airbrushed, not always with a single dramatic edit but with a slow narrowing of who gets to be seen as the real thing.
“The problem is not that Black cowboys are being added to the West’s familiar story; the problem is that the country keeps acting surprised to see them.”
High Horse refuses to treat Black cowboys as a sidebar. It traces a clear line from the skilled labor of formerly enslaved people who handled horses and cattle, to the Black jockeys who dominated early racing, to today’s riders, ranchers and entrepreneurs. The series keeps history present without turning it into a lecture.
One of the show’s strongest choices is to linger on the physical truth of horsemanship: the rider’s seat, their hands, the hours they put in. If you ride, you recognize it immediately. The horse does not care about your story; it responds to consistency and fairness. When you understand this about horses, it becomes apparent how often the cowboy aesthetic is celebrated, while the real work of the craft is overlooked.
In High Horse, the camera often holds on a Black rider seated high and steady, looking out over open land or through city streets and urban edges shaped by the same history. The images are simple, almost quiet, but they carry a charge. For Black Americans, land is not only scenery. It is inheritance and loss. It is promises made, then broken. It is the difference between being a visitor and being a steward.
That overlap is personal for me. My own Texas-raised father was a rancher from boyhood, who later managed land and livestock in California, sowing the seeds that inspired me to launch Outdoor Afro in 2009 as both a blog and memory of his legacy. Like High Horse, Outdoor Afro aimed to set the record straight about our storied connections to the outdoors. That effort evolved into a national organization, and today, it helps thousands of Black families get out in nature annually, not as a trend, but as a reunion.
Now, in midlife, I have returned to horsemanship with a seriousness that surprises even me. Riding has made me more patient and more honest. It has also made me look at land more dimensionally, taking greater responsibility for my own lifestyle choices and the impact they have on both our people and our wild.
My new mare is a mustang from the Twin Peaks Herd Management Area, in the high desert along the California-Nevada line. I named her True Haven as a reminder that God is my refuge, and that peace is something we all can practice in every part of our lives. Horses demand a practice of fairness and consistency, and will immediately let you know whether you’re a trustworthy leader, or not.
Owning a wild horse does not make me an expert on public lands and wildlife policy, but it does keep me intimately close to real questions about stewardship and deepens my commitment to protecting our nation’s public lands and wild places. Slogans lose their relevance when you are holding a lead rope and concentrating on what another living creature needs from you to feel safe and clear.
High Horse understands that the story of Black cowboys cannot be separated from the story of Black land. Not just the romance of wide-open spaces, but the hard math of acreage, access, titles, taxes and the ways that power decides who gets to stay. It does not get lost in policy details, but it does say what too many Westerners avoid: The freedom of the West was never evenly distributed, and violence, legal and otherwise, is a part of the geography.
But High Horse is not a dirge. It is, in its bones, a celebration of freedom. The series shows young riders training and competing, elders passing down knowledge; family traditions and folks gathering around horses the same way other people gather for church potlucks or family reunions. Too often, Black history is served up only as trauma. This series offers another way to see it: excellence, craft, humor, pride, discipline — and joy!
If the series has a weakness, it is the limitation of its scope. Three episodes can raise a banner but cannot hold every complexity. I wanted more time with Black women riders, greater attention paid to the everyday economics of keeping a horse, and a deeper acknowledgment of the way Black and Indigenous histories intersect on Western land.
I also wanted the series to trust its working riders a little more. While the well-known celebrities and scholars add reach and context, providing genuinely illuminating commentary, they risk crowding out the Black cowboys and ranchers, whose stories of working the land and their horses for generations could stand alone without interpretation.
Perhaps High Horse’s greatest achievement is its refusal to see the Black cowboy as an exception. It invites the viewer to reconsider what “Western” means when you widen the frame beyond traditional Hollywood narratives. For anyone who loves the West, this argument is right on time.
Too often, Black history is served up only as trauma. This series offers another way to see it: excellence, craft, humor, pride, discipline — and joy!
Watching it, I kept thinking about my first minutes with my mare: How she watched me, how she waited. How she seemed to be asking who I would be with her, and how I asked myself the same. In the way that a horse responds to clarity, consistency, and care, we should treat our history the same. If we want to live in a West that is honest, with a sturdy future, we should plainly tell the whole story and protect the ground beneath it.
High Horse will not be — and should not be — the last word on Black cowboys. But it is a strong step toward a vision of the West where Black riders are not treated as visitors, but as part of the region’s foundation and our conservation future.
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This article appeared in the March 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The Black cowboy was always here.”
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