White Complexes: How Only White People Are Allowed To Tell The Story of Chess and Be Heard and Credited

 My name is Michael. 

I did the following things in Chess: 

I co-founded the world's biggest grassroots chess community which is solely based on social networking and not a playing server.

I organized the 2013 World Chess Championship venue tour of Chennai for Magnus Carlsen that enabled Magnus to sign the agreement with FIDE for the 2013 WCC final in Chennai.

I invented a chess app you all know as puzzle rush.

I popularised a format of chess social media in which news is posted as and when it happens.

I created a new rating system (Chess Futures) based on a cryptocurrency for chess called ChessCash.



You might wonder why I am not famous and have a huge job with Chess24, Chess.com ChessBase, Chessable or PlayMagnus. You might be curious to understand why neither Chess Club Live or any of my chess products and services are written about on chess websites, talked about on chess podcasts and chess Youtube, or even written about on Wikipedia.

The reason is simple I'm black and the efforts of black content creators and black innovators in chess are not heard or seen. 


I have had people who are global superstars who worked as editors on my various pages who made their communities off the back of my work and succeed for many reasons but were allowed to because their face fit and I didn't succeed because my face didn't fit.

A good example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the most Anglo-Saxon biased websites in the world. If you create an article about something legitimately global in scale that you have done you are race checked and if you pass and have Anglo-Saxon heritage you are allowed to post and your efforts recognized. 

I often wondered what I would have to do to make something I had created in Chess that when I publicized would not be regarded as worth any value but that later became successful when a white person did exactly the same thing having copied my product or service.

What is worse is not all the racial bias but that people who should no better stand by and watch the injustice and even participate in benefiting from the work of a black person after the work has been hijacked by a white person.

I hope one day my story will be told and all those who have tried to silence my truth, block out my light and gaslight my understanding will face their just deserts.




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