Please Read

About a week-and-a-half ago, I started getting emails suggesting that I check out a certain online link. It led to a video of a program originally on Twitch that had taken up residence on YouTube.

In it, a grandmaster was having a humorous time with the Jerome Gambit, this blog, and me. That wasn't much of a surprise - except that most top players would not give the Jerome even a second glance, while the video was 17 minutes long.

So, everyone in the video, including those in the scrolling comments - and, later, those who commented in YouTube - had a good laugh at a chess opening that was probably refuted shortly after it was first played. The Jerome Gambit certainly had a great future behind it.

Okay. 

A video lampooning a blog running for 12 years, posted to every day or every-other-day on that bizarre opening? Are you kidding? Hilarious.

Okay.

The amusement grew. For real, a weird guy who has been researching the Jerome Gambit for a couple of decades, and keeping that blog up-to-date? I mean, come on, does he actually think that it's a good opening?

The grandmaster just had to play some Jerome games online, and then send one to me, borrowing a username and changing his rating. Would it wind up posted on the blog? It was! Untold amounts of  ROTFL!

Okay, too.

The guy was funny. He got into the Jerome Gambit with bravado, looking like its second-biggest fan. He had played fair with me, too - when he sent his game to me, it was in an email with his own name on it. I figured something was up.

Then, Pepe the Frog made an appearance in the video. Originally in Matt Furie's comic, "Boy's Club", the character was later adopted by far-right groups to espouse their causes, much to the creator's embarassment. Despite claims that the anthropomorphic amphibian has been white-washed back to decency, for a lot of people today, the meme still screams hatred and prejudice.

Not okay.

About that point in the video, things started getting awkward, as when the GM was trying to play a game online, and exclaimed  "Dammit, I'm black.... Maybe it works for black as well. I mean it is called the Jerome". Huh?

Then came a brilliant suggestion that Jerome might have originally blundered away a couple of pieces, and then just claimed that he had invented a new opening. Good stuff - if it hadn't been voiced in a stereotypically offensive imitation of a Black person's voice. Not much later, there was an energetic lampooning of the "privilege" that the Jerome, with the white pieces, was all about. The observers in the comments caught it all, and loved it, too.

It took me several runs-through, with CC, to catch much of it.

It was not okay.

Why spoil a surreal chess performance, with such racist offensiveness? What a sense of timing. With with what seems like an endless string of killings of Black people in this country - the most recent, of George Floyd - and the widespread protests of endless police violence being met with more police violence, was any of that necessary? Is it ever necessary?

No.

Even if our prejudices cling to us like a shadow we can't outrun - we can try.

Imagine my excitement at getting an invitation to join the grandmaster on his chess show this week, via Zoom, to further discuss the Jerome Gambit -  that passion of mine for 20 years.

Imagine my disappointment, too. 

Of course, I declined the offer.