Critics have celebrated the award-winning 2020 Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit, for its portrayal of a young woman’s chess prowess. Reigning world champion Magnus Carlson said he enjoyed some of the well-crafted chess problems in the show, and that he liked the acting. The slick production won the Golden Globe for best television mini-series.
The lead actress, Anya Taylor-Joy, captured a character torn between abuse, poverty, drugs, parties, and stone-cold chess calculation with aplomb, for which she won the Golden Globe for best actress.
But what could have been another pat on the back for a TV-show about the only ‘sport’ most people could play during the coronavirus plague turned into a social-media nightmare when Variety magazine upped the political stakes by incorrectly calling Taylor-Joy a ‘woman of colour’.
Variety was delighted to announce that a non-white person achieved prominence in Hollywood, writing that ‘Anya Taylor-Joy is the first woman of colour to win this award since Queen Latifa in 2008 and only the fifth woman of colour to win overall since 1982, when the category was introduced.’
But Taylor-Joy’s mother is of English and Spanish heritage and her father descends from Scots. How exactly Variety failed to realize that they and their daughter, by appearance and descent, are ‘white’ is a partial mystery. But it is worth noting that Taylor-Joy’s mother lived in Zambia and her father in Argentina, from which it seems one or two incorrect assumptions were made.
Variety thought it was very important that a non-white person won a Golden Globe, so whether Variety now considers the award to be ‘racist’ or a perpetuation of ‘systemic racism’ for recognising the talent and hard work of a person who happens to be from the ‘wrong’ race remains an open question. Having realised that Taylor-Joy is just a ‘white’ person who did her job well, Variety replaced its original article with a shorter, more subdued version.
After Taylor-Joy confessed to being white – and even a genuine blonde who dyed her hair red for Queen’s Gambit – she promised she would not dye her hair black for any future role since that would be ‘not fair’ to more deserving people of colour who should get work instead of her.
The US magazine, Vulture, observed: ‘Knowing what you look like can be horrifying, but sometimes it’s a necessary wisdom.’
[Image: Gage Skidmore, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71194482]