Hollywood is a kind of fantasy land and yet also the most imaginative guide to the American psyche.
I grew up with Hollywood’s cowboy films. The world was divided between good cowboys (White Hats) and bad cowboys (Black Hats). This made sense in the era of the Cold War, when the good sheriffs (the US, Nato and western democracies) battled the bad outlaws (Russia and the Warsaw Pact). Native Americans were always called “Indians” although they had nothing whatsoever to do with India and there were no African-American Hollywood cowboys.
Clint Eastwood changed that. In 1992, Eastwood’s film Unforgiven famously featured Morgan Freeman as a cowboy. Freeman wasn’t the first black cowboy on screen, but he certainly was the first world-famous Hollywood star to make it clear to my generation t
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