For instance, five years earlier at the Berlin Conference of 1884, Europeans had begun to execute their colonial plan and “ aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization.”įurther, in the 19th century, there was an awful period of satirizing and dehumanizing Blacks through darkened minstrel caricatures. On page X in the proceedings of the Sixth American Chess Congress in 1889, Steinitz poetically extolled the virtues of chess as being among the “intellectual pastimes of civilized nations.” This is a time when Europeans generally did not regard Africa as a place of civilization.

However, chess players were not only part of the intelligentsia, but also men of their times. Thus, there was a growing consensus that white should move first. The player having the first move must always play with the white men.” In the Fifth American Chess Congress in 1880, it was written on page 164 of the Code of Chess Laws, “The right of first move must be determined by lot. On page 84 of the congress’s proceedings, it refers to one of the letters by citing “the advisableness of always giving the first move, in published games, to the player of the white pieces…” This rule was not immediately adopted, and tournament organizers maintained flexibility on the first move. At the First American Chess Congress, held in New York in 1857, Löwenthal sent two letters to the secretary of the New York Chess Club, Frederick Perrin. Johann Löwenthal, a British master, put forth one of the first proposals of record to give white the obligatory first move. Who decided that white should always go first? In this Q&A, Daaim Shabazz, an international business professor and chess journalist, offers insight into whether there’s any merit to the idea that the rule is meant to uphold white privilege. Editor’s note: Protests over racism have rekindled a longstanding discussion about whether chess promotes white privilege with its rule that the first move always goes to the player with the white pieces.

Chess piece moves rules