On Sunday, February 21 at 2 p.m., in celebration of Kingston Black History Month, Sarah Maslin Nir will be moderating a virtual panel called “The Living Legacy of the Black Cowboy” with three top, pioneering Afrian-American equestrians: Ellis Ferrell, the founder of The Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in Philadelphia; Larry Callies, the founder of The Black Cowboy Museum in Texas; and Abriana Johnson, the co-founder of Young Black Equestrians (shown left to right in above photo).
“We will be discussing the erased legacy of the Black cowboy – 1 in 4 cowboys in the pioneer era were Black – and the present and future of Black Cowgirls and Cowboys — from urban riding centers, to galloping in BLM marches, to Olympic show jumpers – in America,” reads a release announcing the panel.
A link to this Zoom event will be published three days before the event at this link.
Moderator Sarah Maslin Nir is a New York Times reporter and author of Horse Crazy: The story of a woman and a world in love with an animal. The event is co-presented by Sunrays Inc, a local equestrian non profit.
Fortunately, at a very young age I was emphatically told by my mother (who’s of Eastern European heritage) about the exceptionally kind and caring nature of our Black family doctor. She never had anything disdainful to say about people of color; in fact she loves to watch/listen to the Middle Eastern and Indian subcontinental dancers and musicians on the multicultural channels.
Conversely, if she’d told me the opposite about the doctor, I could’ve aged while blindly linking his color with an unjustly cynical view of him and all Black people.
When angry, my (now late) father occasionally expressed displeasure with Anglo immigrants, largely due to his own experiences with bigotry as a new Canadian citizen in the 1950s and ’60s.
He, who also emigrated from Eastern Europe, didn’t resent non-white immigrants, for he realized they had things at least as bad. Plus he noticed—as I also now do—in them an admirable absence of a sense of entitlement.
Therefore, essentially by chance, I reached adulthood unstricken by uncontrolled feelings of racial contempt seeking expression.
Not as lucky, some people—who may now be in an armed authority capacity—were raised with a distrust or blind dislike of other racial groups.
Regardless, the first step towards changing our irrationally biased thinking is our awareness of it and its origin.
But until then, ugly sentiments need to be either suppressed or professionally dealt with, especially when considering the mentality is easily inflamed by anger.