I think it’s a message we send to our kids. And it bothers me that we’re still letting other people tell us what to think. We’re long past that, in my opinion. One phenomenon I’ve noticed, and it’s something that deeply disturbs me, is that my story is often first told by the white media and then told by the black media. I see that happen quite a bit, as if we need to be validated first by white people. When will we validate our own? We need to tell ourselves the truth. Lots of times people ask me, how did you get kids to believe they could be great at chess? I just told them they’re going to be great. That’s it. We didn’t go to tournaments and think we were not going to win. We knew we were the best-prepared team there.
The ghetto of the mind is in some degree optional. The kids’ attitude going into competition was, we’re a group of finely tuned chess champions; deal with us. They knew my expectations for them were way up. Like, you’re going to win the whole thing. We’re not trying to come in second; we’re trying to win. Letting kids know that all we’re accepting are As is the message I’m talking about. We’re not B and B minus. We’re not accepting passing; we’re not accepting Cs; we’re looking at As. If you get a B, all right; you were striving for an A.
Kids can start learning chess at six years old. They can start at two. The older kids get, the more challenges they face. All kinds of influences start to seep in, particularly in high school. One person who struggled with these challenges was a brother named Kenny. As a teenager, he was an extremely talented chess player. At age sixteen or seventeen, he was considered the champion chess player of Harlem. He was also a drug dealer. Kenny was admired in the community both for his skill in chess and for his personal success in the game of drugs. He introduced Kasaun to chess in a park in Harlem. Kenny was a very important person in Kasaun’s life.
After I began coaching the Raging Rooks, there was heavy tension between Kenny and me. Kenny was in his mid-twenties then, and he seemed to want control over the future of Kasaun’s chess game. It was as if he felt that Kasaun was his protégé, and he was jealous or protective. But even if his motives were pure in trying to help Kasaun, he wasn’t a good role model, because he was a dealer. I was on a serious chess path, and I was trying to show Kasaun the way to get to where I was.
Kenny was so furious that when he and I played chess he would fight me like a dog. It was almost like a fight for Kasaun’s soul. He could have whacked me in a minute if he wanted to. But that’s not what he was about. He was trying to prove on a chessboard who was better for Kasaun.
I would consistently win and make Kenny furious. Then one time Kenny saw me win at a chess tournament. After the game he came up to me and shook my hand and said, you know, you’re a strong player. And all the tension lifted. He let me have Kasaun. Kenny was trying to turn himself around. Shortly afterward, unfortunately, his brother shot him in the back and killed him. They’d had an argument. The details aren’t clear, but it seems the fight was over when Kenny was shot.
There are so many Kennys, so many guys who have the potential to be leaders of industry, to be doctors and lawyers. Kenny could have been anything he wanted to be. He could have been a businessman; he could have been a leader. He was a natural at so many things. It just happened that he was influenced to go down the path of drugs. There was no superstructure that fed into Kenny’s potential as a human being. He found a structure in chess, and he found one in being a drug dealer.
Sometimes we look at our people and think they’re not striving, or not excelling. They are striving, but sometimes in the wrong way—the way they think is possible for them because they don’t see the alternatives or aren’t able to access those alternatives in their community.
Many of our kids play basketball, for instance, as if their lives depended on it. Basketball is leading some people out of the ghetto, but very few. It’s spawned some really classy players—like Dr. J and Magic Johnson, who are superlative human beings. In that way it’s been beneficial for our community. But most of our kids are not going to be basketball players or football players. That should not be the dream. It’s a wrong message to send. The dream should be that you’re going to use your mind to become successful. We should be passing on the message that it’s cool to be smart. Bill Gates will tell you that. He may be the biggest nerd on the planet, but he could buy out Harlem many times over.
Our people have been hypnotized by the hype of athletics. There’s the lure of the glamour, of the great clothes and the big house. You lived in a small apartment. You were fine. But now you need a mansion with forty rooms and you need a swimming pool. I think about Mike Tyson, who came out of my neighborhood, and he needs seven cars, one for every day of the week. I mean, come on, what is that about? And then you get guys who have a $100,000 gold chain around their neck and you say, for what? What are we trying to prove? That we have money too? And is the money going to fill the hole inside that tells you you’re not as good as they are? It’s not. The point is to be as good as you can be, and not to judge yourself by other people’s standards.
I can appreciate that deferring gratification is a problem for a large segment of our community. But I think the problem goes beyond feeling trapped and beyond reaching for the most obvious option. There are professional athletes who make millions of dollars and then five or ten years later are flat broke. Bankrupt. And no one can say these guys were without opportunity or hope. They were full of opportunity and hope. It’s true that black America still faces grave economic inequities, but the fact is that even after we get certain opportunities—and this is what saddens me—we seem to defeat ourselves. We seem to go after the appearance of success instead of investing in our abilities for the future.
In life as in chess, you have to take care with everything you have, even if it’s not much. A few wrong moves can end the game almost before it starts. It’s not that all mistakes are irrevocable. It’s not that you make one mistake and you’re dead or you’re in jail. But when you don’t have much to start with and then you take yourself further back from the starting line, you’re setting yourself up for some horrible obstacle that you will have to face later on. Maybe you’re having fun or maybe you’re frustrated, but you’re setting yourself up. The obstacle you started out with was pretty big, but it wasn’t the end of the game. You still had room to grow. But if you refuse to deal with it, the obstacle itself will grow until it’s a wall in your face.
I travel all around the country talking chess. I’m always stunned when I go into a neighborhood and black adults are saying to their kids, look at Maurice Ashley. Look at how great he is. Look what he’s done. And the kids have picked it up. They want my autograph and they want to talk to me and play with me. The point is that they, too, want role models and heroes. They want people to look up to. They want to be like people—like Mike, like Tiger, like Serena and Venus, and, God willing, like Maurice. That’s why the black elite has to be visible. You have to see it to know it’s possible. Look how many lawyers, how many cultured African Americans, came out for the Clarence Thomas hearings. I had never known that that many intelligent black people existed. They just kept rolling them out. That had an amazing effect on everybody, despite all the divisiveness caused by the hearings. Everyone was like, these cats and sisters in suits and so eloquent, where they come from?
People need to see an empowered community of African Americans. It’s true that successful white people aren’t expected to be a role model for every white person alive. And sure, African Americans who are successful should be able to do their thing and be respected for it. But I think African Americans have the additional burden of recognizing that their success rests in part on the sacrifices of those who fought for freedom and civil rights. In some way you have to try to give back.
My main obligation is to be a Grand Master. That is first and foremost. I can’t be a role model unless I’m the man. That’s a full-time job. People can’t be expected to do everything. But they can also become complacent. They can believe it’s enough just to do their job, without an eye to injustice or to those who don’t have the same opportunities or talent.
Willie “Pop” Johnson was a huge influence on me when I was coming up as a chess player. Pop sustained me on many occasions both emotionally and financially. He helped me learn how to stay focused when I’d lose to guys who were better than me, and he made it financially possible for me to buy chess books and enter tournaments when I wouldn’t have been able to do these things on my own. I also remember looking to Arthur Ashe and Jackie Robinson for inspiration. Althea Gibson and Zina Harrison and Debbie Thomas—women who led the charge in white-dominated fields—inspired me. I remember looking at a guy younger than me, Tiger Woods, who won at the Masters in April of 1997 and helped convince me to take my dream of becoming a Grand Master off hold and pursue it in earnest.
I can’t assert that what’s good for Maurice Ashley is good for Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Ken Chenault or Tiger Woods or Venus Williams. All of us face challenges. But there are some who will say, it’s downtime between tournaments. I can go check out some kids and see if there’s any talent. For me, it’s not a burden. It’s selfish. I’m not helping kids because I ought to; I’m helping them because I want to. It cleans out my soul, keeps me fresh and young. I love seeing a new face, a black face that’s going to be the next star, and deciding that this is a kid I could hang with. He gives me power. Hanging with him makes me feel stronger.
Kids survive in the schools. Survival is nothing. You lay low and try to duck the radar. You hope you’re not one of the kids who gets beat up on. And you hold on to a set of strong values. People survive more horrific conditions than drugs and metal detectors and police officers. The question is, how do you thrive? How do you excel?
In
The Tipping Point,
Malcolm Gladwell writes about the small factors that lead to dramatic change. All you need is incremental advances; not everybody has to change all at once. At some point, things tip, and then suddenly there’s an epidemic of change. I think we’re approaching a time when kids’ aspirations will be much, much higher than they were. We have a long way to go to put the structures in place that can finally bring about progress race-wide, but we’re closing in on the effort psychologically. People can sit back now and say, we have Tiger Woods, we have Maurice Ashley, we have the Williams sisters, we have Ken Chenault and Vernon Jordan. We have people striving in all walks of life.
We were a strong people coming out of Africa. We need to revisit what we had. Egyptian kings and pharaohs played games like chess. The dark-skinned Moors brought chess to Spain in the early 700s a.d. and taught it to the Spaniards—along with mathematics, medicine, and architecture. This legacy was lost in their conquest and in our subsequent conquest. Much as we’ve become accustomed to thinking that we’re less intelligent than other people, my dream is that we will shake off this delusion and recognize that we’re as smart as anyone else.
Harlem is changing big-time. In 1991, the year the Raging Rooks won a National Championship, violence and divisiveness were at their height in Harlem, and David Dinkins was still mayor of New York. I was interviewed on
CBS News This Morning
after the team’s victory. They asked me what I thought about Harlem, and I said, I think the success of these kids symbolizes a new Harlem Renaissance. Afterward I thought about what I said. I had asserted that the championship represented a fundamental change in the community. Well, the face of Harlem has changed in the eleven years since I made that remark. I could suggest that chess had a big part in it. But I think the deeper reality is that my success in working with the kids, along with my personal success, helped reveal to others the potential of the community. It helped make people start to think, what if these kids really did have a chance? What if they had a better school environment, a better teacher, a better education? What if we made enough change in the community that these kids could make a difference? If they didn’t have to worry about violence on the streets, and if they didn’t have to worry about drug dealers, what would happen? We showed that amazing things happen. Kids win national championships in chess after just two years of hard work.
I want the kids I teach to understand that no matter where you’re from, you can succeed. I’m a living example. Many of us are living examples. We shouldn’t have to deal with obstacles of poverty and inferior education, of violence and drugs in our communities. Sure we should work for parity. Your life can’t go according to plan if you have no plan. Every star chess player knows it’s the endgame where the competition is won. When somebody asks, how fast can you beat him, I say, it’s not how fast, it’s when. I know it’s going to happen; it’s just going to take time.
In 1999 I founded the Harlem Chess Center at HEAF, the Harlem Educational Activities Fund. “Where young minds come first” was my slogan. Without the tremendous support and direction that HEAF has been providing since 1992, thousands of inner-city kids who have gone on to college as a result of HEAF programs would have fallen through the cracks.
The kids come to the Harlem Chess Center every day after school, and on Saturdays they have tournaments. They sit and memorize and study so that when they get into actual competition they’ll be ready. There’s some explosive energy in that room. You can’t mess with those guys. They’re assassins.
The great thing about chess is that it’s practical. It’s not, I’m learning algebra and wondering what the heck I’m going to do with it. Not that algebra isn’t meaningful, but we don’t help our kids enough with translating what they learn in school to the real world. We try to convince kids that they should learn for the sake of learning. Now, that makes sense to adults, and maybe even to kids in affluent communities. It’s much harder for inner-city kids to understand why they should learn something that seems to have no meaning for their future life. But in chess, I’ll show kids a move and five minutes later they can use it against their friend. In another five or ten minutes, they’ll win the game and come back to me and say, show me something else, ’cause I just won that game and I wanna win again. It’s self-reinforcing.