Netflix’s ‘Cowboy Bebop’ reignites a debate: Is Jet Black a Black anime character? That makes “Cowboy Bebop” part of a larger phenomenon observed by scholars like Amy Lu, associate professor at Northeastern University. In a 2009 study, Lu asked more than 1,000 people to identify the race of nearly 350 anime protagonists, based solely on images of their faces. “Cowboy Bebop’s” Spike Spiegel was one of them.