New to Chess? All you need to know is that the Queen Moves Differently.

The objective of chess is easy: checkmate the opponent’s king. A game of strategy, foresight, and anticipation with sixteen pieces, each having a unique way of moving across the board. The king is the piece you lose the game without, but it’s the queen that holds the real power. She moves in every direction, covering more ground and protecting everything around her.

Being Black at a predominantly white institution (PWI) feels like an intense game of chess. It’s not school, it’s strategy. Every move is calculated, and you can never get caught slipping. You’re asserting your presence in a space that was never meant for you and still trying to thrive within it. Anticipating the unspoken assumptions means navigating microaggressions, and you adapt to protect yourself because your presence isn’t the same as belonging. Like the queen, you do more than one thing at a time, and the game is nonstop.

Comments about our skills? That’s a pawn move masked as praise, but loaded with surprise. Getting confused as another student? That’s a knight move, clumsy, crossing lines in an unrecognizable way. Your ideas being ignored until someone else repeats them? That’s a bishop move, it’s diagonal and indirect, somehow cutting across you.

What’s your response? You smile when tired, laugh when annoyed, and stay calm when angry, because you can do no wrong. That’s what it feels like to be Black in these spaces. The expectation to move everywhere at once, see everything coming, and never get caught slipping.

And when you finally want to vent in a space that fully gets it, without explanation, you come to a draw. In minority student organizations, we breathe a little easier and speak a little freer. But even those spaces feel tucked away and carved out for “us” rather than integrated into the broader culture, as if we are not in 2025. It’s as if belonging is conditional and available in pockets, but never the default. We gather in rooms while the rest of the campus keeps spinning, unaware that we’re carrying the dual weight of excellence and identity every time we step outside.

I attend Duke University, where the first five Black students enrolled in the fall of 1963, and 62 years later, the Class of 2028 enrolled 13% of Black students. As a first-generation student, these statistics were not on my mind when I applied to college. I knew I was attending a PWI, but I never thought the number of people who looked like me could barely fill a large lecture room. I also know I am not alone in feeling this way; Black students at many different PWIs have similar feelings.

Still, we find strength in ourselves. The spaces carved out for us on campus, cultural orgs, sisterhood and brotherhoods, cookouts, and more lead to communities and families that help us continue not to play the game of chess, but master it.

The thing about the queen is that she can move any number of spaces vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, meaning she can do anything the pawn, knight, and bishop can and more. That’s who we, every black student at a PWI, are becoming. We are mastering a game not made for us, and changing the rules while we play it.

The king may be the end goal according to the rules; however, anyone watching the board knows where the real power lies.