Opinion: To my understanding, the immediate assumption of anyone wearing a cowboy hat in public is that they are a redneck or conservative. The history goes deeper than that, and maybe I just want to wear one because.
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Yes, I grew up with sidewalks, and no, a chubby bird didn’t yell at the sun to wake me up. When I get hungry, I walk to a Safeway; I don’t slaughter a mammal I accidentally made companionship with. I’ve never gotten used to the smell of manure driving past Corvallis on I-5, I’ve only mowed — not sown — a field and the one time I saddled on a horse, it wandered off into the forest away from our tour guide.

Regardless of these facts, I think I’m an excellent candidate to make wearing a cowboy hat out in public cool again.

I have no qualifications to look like a cowboy, but must that always be necessary? My girlfriend got me this very nice black gambler hat, and it simply deserves to be worn outside of the house. My roommates are confused as to why I just wear it to the kitchen and back to my room.

My only barrier to adding the hat to my standard outwear is the presumption of a cowboy-hat-wearing, mustache-bearing white man is that you really shouldn’t ask his opinion on immigration. Understandably so, but I didn’t find the urge to wear a large brimmed hat on Jan. 6. I heard and answered the call to the Old West the same way any person my age did: listening to Marty Robbins and playing “Red Dead Redemption 2.”

Despite my intentions of merely wanting to look like a cowboy and embody my idealized and chimerical version of a time period where parking lots and Dutch Bros. didn’t exist, the stereotype of a cowboy hat wearer is typically that of a conservative, a redneck or a drunk frat guy.

I’m not sure what image I want to avoid more: David Clarke on Fox News saying the worst combination of words you’ve ever heard or a pledge dumping Coors on their brim while “Party in the U.S.A.” plays in the background. Though with these two images of cowboy hat wearers, I find a middle ground of where I want to be with my hat.

One end of the spectrum sees cowboy hats as a rite of passage; a device to divide yourself from the world that progresses forward that must be earned through living anywhere near a ranch or tractor. The other end sees the hat as a $10 costume for a themed Friday night rager. Not to sound like an insufferable centrist, but both sides are bad and I’m way smarter than both for acknowledging that.

To me, anyone can wear the hat. Still, wear it right.

Don’t get it trashed and bent and only wear it to throw an imaginary lasso around someone at a dance. Wear it because it’s comfortable, covers your face from the sun and because you just don’t want to look people in the eye that day, like I do. Don’t throw a tantrum because you saw a kid in the city wear a cowboy hat. You and your conservative brethren can still have your pit viper glasses; no one else wants those.

With this conclusion, I decided to finally test the waters on wearing it out of the house and asked people on campus their opinions on people who wear cowboy hats.

Expectedly, a few people did express concern when they see someone in public who does have one on them. However, many people said they didn’t make that hick assumption of me because of the rest of my outfit being that of a standard college student. A few made the connection that if I went further with the “cowboy look” (i.e boots and blue jeans), then the stereotype would revitalize.

While I think most of the compliments I received felt like people just not willing to hurt my feelings on camera, I felt encouraged that a majority of people didn’t put the “country boy” label on me. Although, I began to wonder why the blue jeans, boots and white tank top redneck was the image they told me to avoid with the hat.

One of the students I talked to was senior Abraham Zepeda, who taught me about the actual roots of the hat I was wearing and where the inspiration of the modern cowboy hat came from.

Vaqueros — Spanish for “cowboy” or “cattle-driver” — inhabited the west of the country, notably in areas like Texas and California, before western settlers colonized the land. While driving the ranch, these vaqueros wore wide circle brimmed hats with a tall crown that look awfully similar in design to the hat I own. That is because John B. Stetson, the creator of the first “cowboy hat” in 1865, was almost certainly influenced by the design of the sombreros the Mexican cowboys had already been wearing for decades.

“I think some people wear the hat thinking, ‘Oh this is a cool part of my culture,’ when in reality if you go back hundreds of years, it was someone else’s first,” Zepeda said. “For the most part, it doesn’t offend me seeing people wear the hat, but at the end of the day, I think a lot of people are just uninformed about the history of the hat.”

So why is the stereotype of a cowboy hat wearer a problematic hick when hicks are just copying old west cowboys who, in turn, copied the vaqueros? I don’t have the answer to fixing cultural appropriation, but I think I have a pretty good baseline. If you don’t think the descendants of the original cowboy hat wearers have a place in this country, leave the buckaroo hat on the shelf. Let someone cooler wear it.