Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation

Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life.

In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place—from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of “equestrian chic” was born, to the reclamation—or, in Lil Nas X’s word, yeehawification—of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them?

Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of “horse people”—the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness—to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image.

Mounted EPB is more than a history—it is a reclamation and a reckoning.

• Black Cowboys: Go beyond the myth of the lone white ranger to explore the reclamation of cowboy imagery in films like The Harder They Fall and the music of Lil Nas X.
• Slavery and Resistance: Uncover the forgotten history of fugitivity, where enslaved people used the very tools of the plantation—the horses—as vehicles for their own liberation.
• Pop Culture Analysis: From Beyoncé’s rodeo performances to the Jamaican dancehall scene’s adoption of Western aesthetics, see how Black artists have reshaped the equestrian world.
• A Queer & Diasporic Lens: Read through the author’s personal experience as a Black, queer equestrian of Jamaican and Filipino heritage, connecting horse stewardship to gender, sexuality, and identity.