Gentrification in Concrete Cowboy and Modern-Day Colonialism

By Ashley Wright

Recently, Netflix released the 2021 American Western film Concrete Cowboy, directed by Ricky Staub, which is a film adaptation of the book Ghetto Cowboy by Greg Neri. The original novel and the movie both serve as a fictionalized retelling of the real-life Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, which was a society based on African American horse-riding culture in Philadelphia. The movie follows a fifteen-year-old boy named Cole who is sent to live in Philadelphia with his estranged father after getting expelled from school. Cole is a typical Western protagonist, clearly feeling isolated from his community and spending the first portion of the movie traveling the streets with little more than a place to sleep after leaving his dad’s house following an argument. As Cole spends more time in Philly, however, he grows closer with his dad and the local community. During the days, Cole works at the local stable and learns more about the urban cowboys but at night he rides around with his friend Smush, getting into trouble involving the local drug dealers. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that one of the threats facing the community is not just from within the neighborhood itself but also the threat of gentrification and white developers closing in and shutting down the Riding Club all-together.

Cole’s father, Harp, and the other urban cowboys take it upon themselves to teach Cole not only the importance of hard work at the stables, but also the history behind it. The group details the long history of Black cowboys in America, blaming the erasure of their history on the fact that “Hollywood has whitewashed us, they just deleted us right out of the history books.” The white role in the erasure of the Black cowboys is far from contained in the past, however, as the threat of gentrification becomes a looming presence as the film progresses. At one point Paris, a character who was paralyzed by and lost his brother to an altercation over a street corner, even laments over the fact that the city put a Starbucks on that corner turning what they were fighting for into nothing. The struggle against incoming developers intensifies as the horses at the club are taken by animal control due to complaints to the property owners (as the characters in the film can only afford to rent), against the backdrop of the characters’ protests and cries that “we built this place, y’all tryna tear this place down! We built this place; this is our home.” Even as the stables are torn down, however, the characters are able to bind together through their shared identity as cowboys, and vow to continue riding and maintaining their heritage despite any outside forces.

Despite being set over 100 years apart, the film Concrete Cowboy actually shares a lot thematically with the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This is because of the role of gentrification in the film, which is also known as modern-day colonialism, and the parallels to the criticism of white colonialism in Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad’s novel draws a dark picture of colonialism, depicting the brutal realities of a white superpower entering native communities, abusing their people, and depriving them of their resources. In the novel, Marlow and the other characters slowly realize that colonialism is not a means for “improving” communities that European countries view as less than but is instead a tool for inflicting violence and other unspeakable horrors to native communities. These themes, while perhaps more subtle than the images depicted in Heart of Darkness, can be found in modern-day stories of gentrification as well. Concrete Cowboy shows how development groups enter communities of color under the guise of “bettering” low-income areas but instead harm the locals and threaten to shut down their livelihoods all-together.

Despite the major differences between these two works, it is important to draw these comparisons to see how concepts that may seem contained to the past, such as colonialism, still play a role in modern society and impact different communities and cultures. In this way, Concrete Cowboy is not only a film worth watching on its own merit, but also because of the larger conversations it invites its audiences to engage in.