It’s Time to Ban Chess

Imagine a game where the goal is to protect the “king,” where “white” moves first, where the “queen sacrifice” is applauded, where anti-choice “bishops” roam the board looking for “pawns” to terrorize, and where horse-shaped characters routinely face slaughter.

Patriarchal?  Yes.  Racist?  Yes.  Sexist?  Absolutely.  Speciesist?  You bet.

So why is this game — chess — still played today?

To call chess “problematic” would be an insult to problems.  Chess represents everything wrong with the world.

In chess, black always moves at a perpetual disadvantage to white.  According to Arthur M. Stevens’ The Blue Book of Charts to Winning Chess, which reviewed 56,972 master games, white beats black in games 59.1% to 40.9%.  Chess is white privilege on steroids.

Chess inculcates damaging heteronormative values in children.  Every game starts with one king and one queen per side.  Why not two kings or two queens?  Why does the queen never act as the key piece?  Of course, we applaud chess for its periodic support of polygamy when extra queens take the board.  But extra queens essentially form a haram for the king.  Never does the game add extra kings on a side.  Chess is homophobic and sexist.

Chess openings include names like the “English opening,” the “Dutch defense,” and the “Russian opening.”  Why is there no “African opening” or “Hispanic-American defense”?  Why is there an “Evans gambit,” but no “Muhammad gambit” or “Obama gambit”?

Chess instills bourgeois class values in players.  Only a few select pieces, including religious clerics (bishops) and hereditary aristocrats (knights, etc.), have special moves.  Everyone else is a lowly “pawn,” by far the most common, and worthless, piece on the board.  In fact, most experts consider the term “piece” to exclude pawns.  In chess, pawns are mere cannon fodder, unless some privileged king makes one a queen.  Excuse me, but a womyn doesn’t need a man to succeed.  In an equitable game, all pieces would be equal.

Of the top fifty players in the world, thirty-seven are white males.  Twelve are Asian.  Only one is African (Bassim Amin from Egypt).  None are womyn.  None are from Sub-Saharan Africa.  How exactly is a womyn supposed to play chess well when she probably thinks to herself every move, “Why am I protecting the king?  Shouldn’t he be protecting me?”

Why are there “bishops,” but no imams, sheikhs, or muftis?  Why are there no non-binary or gender-fluid chess pieces?  Gender is a continuum.

The competitive, war-like nature of chess also reinforces patriarchal manifestations of sexual dominance unacceptable in the era of #MeToo.  How can we possibly allow a male bishop to “pin” a queen?  Is it OK for him to rape her too?

Chess has no place in the current year.  It is racist, sexist, homophobic, and Islamophobic at its very core.  It’s time to ban chess.

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