Do you understand the purpose of hyperbole in prose?

When humans communicate, we don't use Backus-Naur form. We generally accept that people will be able to derive the meaning from context. Does the author literally believe that over 50% of the planet watched it? The claim is preposterous - and obviously so. But it is a convenient shorthand for referring to the impact on the cultural zeitgeist made by that show.

Anyway, QG was astonishingly popular. See https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/the-queens-gambit-most-p... and https://adage.com/article/media/golden-globe-winner-queens-g...

Not the only bold statement in the article.

>But I'm a smart guy (hi white male privilege)

It's amusing to see someone go mask off and call non-whites low IQ like that.

I don't think that's what they meant.

I’m not so charitable. It’s nearly impossible for one to walk around self-conceptualizing as a privileged white male without the inherent identitarianism and rank ordering of identity groups corrupting you into bigotry.

His association with “smart” with “white male privilege” is a mask slip. Yet all saviours believe in some way, they are more powerful and capable than those they are saving. Even if all they’re better at is a board game.

What did they mean? Can't figure it out.

Educated. Access to good schools.

Which amounts to concluding that whites are collectively more intelligent than other racial groups with extra steps. Funny to hear from a group slowly having its wealth and population collapse. Maybe they’re not actually smart and are just entranced by conspicuous displays of intelligence like school and chess.

You can’t have privilege unless you are in some way more powerful and able than other groups in the first place. I think one day people are going to wake up one day and realize that white people are just like everybody else. That they’re unremarkable - not some privileged elite.

What has that got to do with being good at chess?

The concept of privilege is that you have time/energy/resources to do things like play chess instead of looking for work. I'm not sure if you're questioning the concept of privilege (which is fine) or saying that it specifically doesn't have anything to do with chess.

Oof, when you try to be self-deprecating and acknowledge your privilege and it's still racist.

You either believe there's white male privilege, and the author is correct, or you don't, and he... has a different opinion than you?

I'm not going to go more into it because I dislike framing this clear class problem as a race problem, but I wanted to point out the erroneous reasoning.