I spent this past weekend at what I’m pretty sure is the whitest event I’ve ever attended—which is saying something, because I’ve been at some lily-white venues. My first “rock” concert was soft rock crooner Dan Fogelberg, ok? Well into high school I had a record collection basically built around singer-songwriter James Taylor. My mom and stepdad belonged to a tennis club in Manhattan Beach, California, which in the 1980s had few members of color (by demographics, not policy per se, but still). My dad grew up a farmer’s son in Iowa (hello), and later became a rodeo aficionado, which meant summers traveling to Wyoming for Cheyenne’s Daddy of ‘Em All, the largest, most famous rodeo short of the National Pro Rodeo Finals. That meant immersion in the spectator side of ranch culture, plus country music concerts in the evenings. When he accepted God as his personal lord and savior, Daddy joined a megachurch in Orange County, California, and that was new level of white culture, the fuzzy, feel-good, get-saved, listen to Christian rock variety. And, yeah, I came to adulthood through primarily white educational institutions, going to white majority lesbian bars in the nineties, and marrying a woman from suburban Milwaukee.
Not that there aren’t lots of different ways of doing whiteness, but I’d wager that all this background gives me a better grip on deep white culture than even the average white person whose world is not inside the KKK.
And yet, I clearly had not seen it all, because this weekend my dad—who I should mention has answered to the actual nickname Cowboy for the last couple decades—took me to a thing called the Grand Encampment Cowboy Gathering in the town he lives in. And, lo, it arguably was the whitest of all the white things I have ever seen. I’m still processing.
(note raffle prize of original Mountain Man painting)
What made it just so white—but also very unconsciously so? By “unconsciously,” I mean that these old cowboys (and many of their wives, and a few kids scattered among them) sitting in folding chairs under a couple of large tents listening to a sequence of singers, poets, and musicians perform on a portable community stage, certainly did not think they were attending some kind of “racial” event. Few would have imagined what they were doing had anything to do with race. They were simply coming together, as they have been for the past 20 years, to honor and enjoy their historical traditions as a community. For them, it would just so happen that the crowd was entirely, at least so far as the eye could see, white, because, well, in this area of the Platte Valley, most folks happen to be white.
When everyone you see is white, just like you are white, you don’t have to think about your whiteness, because it is invisible to you in the absence of contrast. And that invisibility feels neutral, it feels as natural as the clear blue Wyoming sky. Unremarkable. (What kind of woke leftie communist would even remark on it? Come on, now.)
At the gathering, cowboys, or folks performing cowboys (mostly older men, two singing sisters, and one girl of about 10), were singing songs and telling stories about the cowboy life—which means gathering up a bunch of details about ranching and cattle-raising, land, and skills of the trade and spinning them into compelling tales. And in the gathering up, a whole lot of myth and romance, lies and glosses, elisions and subtle defenses get gathered up with them. What develops across the event is a collective narrative about a particular people group’s relationship to imagined enemies and friends, insiders and outsiders, God and nature, and especially freedom and not-freedom.
Everything about these rituals is human. Carl Jung, who in addition to studying the human psyche was also a keen student of world cultures, would recognize story-spinning as universal, and the figures in the stories as common archetypes. The heroic rebel (who single-handedly diverts a cattle stampede on a stringy mustang), the bumbling try-hard (who can never get it right), the beautiful señorita (over whom the cowboys battled), the moments of transcendental connection with the divine (through a sunrise seen over the ledge of a dark canyon). Themes of odyssey and battle, love, conquest, vindication, incomprehensible wonder at nature’s beauty.
So far, though, I haven’t described anything beyond white people doing white stuff without thinking of it as white because they don’t have to. But more than that was happening at the Cowboy Gathering. The white part is channeled indirectly, through certain threads woven through these stories, in the distinctive context of this nation’s history and culture. And I think a key clue to the way in which it is white is that these threads are spun with a total lack of self-reflection or irony about their content or the ritual of enacting them. The Cowboy Gathering seems never to have considered even winking at itself, and this is anchored in its whiteness, its sense of earned inheritance, natural entitlement.
It’s not that there isn’t humor in cowboy poetry or music, because there is plenty. There is even humor at the expense of the protagonists—the ways they stumble or fail or do something absurd and comic, getting themselves into a pickle. But the humor in the Cowboy Gathering is always insider humor, bounded by its own tropes; it never signals awareness that there might be something noteworthy, at least from an outside perspective, about twenty-first century white people polishing a cultural shrine to their own mythic icons even as the country diversifies and engages in another cycle of fraught, polarized engagements around our ongoing and sometimes severe racial inequality. (Of course, this is an inequality which many white conservatives systematically deny exists.) There’s an insularity to it that, while we might say is common to any subculture gathering, is in this case a reflection of the cultural dominance white people in the U.S. can, in the aggregate, take for granted.
I’ll put it another way: Most groups who have been part of minority subcultures—say, Polish-Americans, Puerto Ricans, LGBTQ folks, Jews—tend to insert some sort of self-reflexive irony, some self-deprecating humor into their gatherings, because as minorities they are perpetually aware of the gaze of the majority culture upon them. Indeed, they’ve rarely been allowed to forget how their difference is viewed through the eyes of the majority they were or are judged against, and they play with that. Italian Americans gather, and they revere their traditions as much as anyone, but they also send themselves up.
Not so with the Cowboy Gathering, perhaps because it is a dominant culture legacy, and if you buy into belonging in those myths earnestly, self-deprecation is not viable. Currently, the dominant culture of masculinity, whiteness, settler colonialism, and—sorry to use another academic buzzword, but heteropatriarchy—has been on the defense for at least 20 years, as its moral legitimacy has been called into question by those who’ve experienced the exclusions and injustices it has enacted (land theft, reservations, and boarding schools; unequal policing and other structural racisms; the stripping of privacy rights for women, queer, and trans folks). This isn’t a great environment for deadly earnest American boosterism, but of course that’s exactly when proponents double down on it, at least when they’re with their own. Thus: this year marked the 20th , not the 100th or even 50th, anniversary of the Cowboy Gathering. Because a century ago, this white culture was not playing defense; it could take itself for granted as some part of the backbone of America.
One of the distinctive characteristics of dominance is the dominant group’s conquest of neutrality, which is a process of figuring itself as the ideological (and linguistic) standard against which otherness is defined. As rational “man” claims himself to be the universal, neutral arbiter of human experience, woman is written out of rights to property, to citizenship, to political sovereignty, and bodily autonomy. She must fight her way into the category of human to earn rights claimed as “self-evident” to her father or husband. As Europeans define themselves as white, beginning around the early 17th century, all others they encounter are marked as racial inferiors. This authorizes colonial settlement on lands already inhabited by other people with laws, communities, civilizations, and concepts of rights and responsibilities. European settlers become American colonizers, on horseback, riding roughshod over the land.
As contemporary cowboys gather, they take for granted—they take as foreordained and morally neutral—their ancestral links to land acquisition by force and their own self-referential laws, to dominance over, but also selective respect for, nature. They see themselves as the embodiment of “freedom,” as connected to land and animals, the ever-changing skies, the shadowy canyons, (as narrated by the sisters Amy and Annie, who sang their nostalgia-soaked anthem to Wyoming in the Saturday night finale). I’m not saying I couldn’t enjoy it for what it was, but I couldn’t enjoy it without reflecting on what was taken for granted within it.
Even as they narrate their indigenous adversary, the Indian, as the noble predecessor who understood the land and its inhabitants best of all, this cowboy culture, this thing that feels in some ways to me like a fake rebel outlaw cult, signs onto the civilizing project, buying into the homestead deed or the corporate cattle ranch for his own material benefit. The cowboy is not free and unrestricted; he is embedded in and benefits directly from a system of government he nonetheless postures against in casual conversation. And in that process, the Indian must be vanquished with violence, and the cowboy pretends that the conquest was morally authorized by God himself. So as we listen to recitations of cowboy poetry we pretend the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho aren’t living on a reservation 200 miles away, where the last remainder of them were driven at the points of rifles. But the cowboy paints himself neutral (the whiteness of a blank slate), as innocent and unsoiled (the pure white), and morally blessed (if not an angel in white, at least a kind of national saint). We pretend that this is the heart of America, that no one else worth mentioning—the descendants of slaves, non-European immigrants, refugees—really has the same entitlement to it, and that really, it is the humble cowboy who understands it best of all.
