Playing Chess, Not Checkers
- Karla Lee
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
They will tell you your child is a token when the truth is they are more like pawns.. Here is how three generations learned to play chess.
They will tell you your child is a token. I want to offer you another word because while a token is decorative, a pawn is a piece. It is placed on a board and moved for someone else’s strategy, counted when the numbers help and sacrificed when they do not. That is closer to what happens to Black children in the diversity game. We are counted into quotas and ratios that were never built around us. And the only way to protect our kids inside that game is to stop playing checkers, reacting one move at a time, and start playing chess.
My mother went first
My mother integrated a public school in Decatur, Alabama, in the seventh grade. She was one of the only Black girls at Austin High. She has spent her whole life as a vocal advocate, and still, she does not speak fondly of those years. I do not think she has ever fully named how much it cost her. Her generation was taught that the sacrifice was the price of the greater good, that being the only one in the room was a necessary evil you endured without complaint. She was a pawn moved to the front of the board, and she was told to call it progress.
Then it was my turn
My parents bought a home on a historic street in the Black community. What they did not fully know when they signed was that the address came with a challenge: under-resourced schools, the kind the district labels failing. My mother decided our neighborhood school was not an option. And I will be honest with you. I am not sure we would have belonged there either. We would have shared a race, a zip code, and an ethnicity, and still been held at arm’s length for reasons of class. Belonging is rarely just one thing.
So she did the next best thing she could find. Private school for kindergarten and first grade, while she figured out better. And better, when it came, was a transfer across town, where I would be the micro-minority all over again like she was in the 7th grade. But this time the principal was a Black woman who lived across the street from us. My granny’s best friend taught fifth grade in that building. It was not ideal. In my mother’s mind it was the solution she was looking for that got them out of paying taxes and tuition. The mix at that school was not really mixed. Most of the Black students came from the housing projects downtown. The white students came from the neighborhoods around it. My address meant that I didn't fit, and even at eight years old, the other children knew it. They were not mean to me. They just were not warm. At the end of fifth grade, the transfer to the feeder middle school was denied. That school had already met its quota for Black students. It did not need any more of students like me.
So I started over again, a micro-minority in a new building, learning a new board again.
And then, a year and two months into seventh grade, I got the opportunity to attend a magnet program. This school was literally around the corner from my home, but Court-ordered desegregation again, quotas and ratios again, but this time I was a minority but far from the only one. I finally got to be a person instead of just a number. That is where I found my people. White friends, Hispanic friends, Black friends. That is the first place I remember feeling like I belonged.
Checkers reacts. Chess positions.
Here is what I understand now that I could not have understood then. Every school I attended was a square on a board someone else was playing. The quotas moved me. The ratios placed me. My belonging was a rounding error.
My belonging was a rounding error.
My mother could not change the game. What she could do, with the moves available to her, was position me as carefully as she could. A Black principal here. A family friend in a classroom there. Private school as a holding pattern until something better opened up. That is chess. Thinking two and three moves ahead, and refusing to just react to whatever square the district dropped us on.
Checkers is sending your child wherever the zip code assigns them and hoping. Chess is knowing the ratios before you ever tour the school. It is seeking the critical mass and not just the brochure diversity. It is building community outside the building, so your child is never depending on one room to see them. And it is telling your child plainly, before anyone else can tell them otherwise, that they are not a number.
Three generations, a few moves further
My mother played a better game than she was given. I am trying to play a better one than she could. When it was time for my own daughter, I watched her spend years well liked and unseen, and I did not tell her to endure it as a necessary evil. We found a school where she could see herself and be seen. It cost us an hour in the car each way. It was worth every mile. She found her people, the same way I finally found mine. Each generation gets the board a little further down the line.
I was a pawn on someone else’s board. So was my mother. But we are not raising pawns. We are raising children who know the game is being played, who know they were never just a ratio, and who will one day sit down at the board and play it on purpose too. That is the whole point of learning chess. You stop being the piece or pawn. You become the player.
You stop being the piece. You become the player.
The move you can make this week
Chess is not only the big decisions, the schools and the transfers and the zip codes. It is also the small, specific moves most parents never realize are theirs to make. Classroom placement is one of them. You are usually allowed to write a letter, before the year starts, asking that your child be placed with a particular teacher or in a particular room, and telling the school exactly why. Most parents never send it, because no one ever told them they could. That letter is a chess move.
In chess, one of the most important elements of strategy is position. And most parents leave their child’s position entirely to chance. Not because they do not care, but because no one ever told them they were allowed to weigh in, and no one ever told them their thoughts would matter. They do. Your read on your own child is information the school does not have. A letter is how you put it on the board.
The first script I ever shared was that classroom placement letter. Hundreds of you used it, and hundreds of you wrote back. It taught me something I have not been able to unlearn: parents do not need more encouragement to advocate. You are not short on courage. You are short on words. You need to know exactly what to say, and how to say it, so the room knows you did not just come to play. You came to win.
This is week three of Back to School on the Blog, and one of the conversations I have been putting into words all summer. My Truly Yours community got first access to the whole set, every script for every room. It's now open for everyone for $27. Make it truly yours by clicking the link below:
Comments