THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT SUFFERS FROM THE ‘MAGICAL NEGRO’ PROBLEM
THE CHESS PLAYER in me was quickly won over by
The Queen’s Gambit. The Netflix miniseries sees Anya Taylor-joy’s young prodigy Beth Harmon rise through the ranks of the competitive chess world in the 1960s. That made it all the more disappointing when I excitedly hit play on the final hour, only to see the show fall headfirst into an outdated trope: the ‘Magical Negro’.
Like Beth, Moses Ingram’s Jolene is a fellow orphan whom we meet in the inaugural episode, a then-bratty teen who takes our protagonist under her wing. But we never see or hear about her again until she turns up on
Beth’s doorstep just as she’s in the midst of a self-destructive, alcohol-fuelled spiral. Despite dialogue which explicitly states that Jolene isn’t Beth’s “guardian angel”, that’s exactly what she becomes; in addition to sobering her up, she funds our heroine’s expensive trip to Russia for the seriesending matches.
Had we seen more of Jolene — the only Black character of any significance in the entirety of the series — and her relationship with Beth prior to her reappearance in the final episode, this may not have been so much of an issue. Instead, all we get are unearned platitudes like “we’re family” that ring false. Meanwhile, beyond surfacelevel details on her job as a paralegal, Jolene is not fleshed out nearly enough as a character in her own right. This makes her little more than the Black best friend who serves no function other than to help white characters when they need it most.
This is not a problem that’s unique to The Queen’s Gambit. The Green Mile, The Legend Of Bagger Vance and, more recently, Best Picture-winner Green Book all perpetuated this backward stereotype to varying degrees. But now more than ever, even when Black characters aren’t leading the narrative, it’s crucial that they are given full arcs that have nothing to do with servicing the stories of their white counterparts. That way, we will be seen as more than pawns to white characters’ Queens, and the art and the audience will be better for it.