Chess is plagued by elitism

Any activity is just one activity.

Chess is very intellectual in every way, as seen in the discussions on the Forum here.

"Chess, throughout history has shown, at the highest levels to be a game reserved to the wealthy"

This has never been true.  Chess has been played by people from all classes for the last 150 years. 

I believe the in the pre-Morphy days you learned chess by playing the resident expert for small stakes at the Cafe de la Regence in Paris or Simpson's Coffee house in London.  Chess was not a poor person's game back then, but school teachers  and students matched wits with bankers and doctors.  

A lot of trashtalk coming my way huh? My opinion invalid? Pffft, no u. What I'm saying is, if there is not a chess club in your city, you won't get a shot at having an environment that could take you to the top. I bet you five bucks that all those masters quoted had some sort of good chess clubs with good chess players to butt heads with daily. If you are a small town poor kid with no chess club, you don't have a shot. Location matters in determining whether you will become a high end master, if this is proven wrong, it is most probably explained because you are affluent. Eat that chumps.

"if there is not a chess club in your city, you won't get a shot at having an environment that could take you to the top. "

40 years ago, if you lived in a small country with no great chess tradition, like Norway, there wasn't a chance in hell that you could become a strong grandmaster. But the internet has changed all that. All the latest grandmaster games? Right at your fingertips! An endless supply of strong opponents available night and day? At your fingertips. Want your choice of good chess coaches from around the world, many at very reasonable rates? Right at your fingertips!

Perfect.

I saw the movie The Blind Side, in a second run movie theater, for $1. I am a naturalized USA citizen. In that way, I too am adopted, adopted into America.

You can make a movie about an adopted kid with natural brawn who grew up to be somebody.

I came to America when I was 10. When I was 9 years old in Vietnam, I made my first Chinese Chess set using discarded bottle caps and a piece of paper. And I knew about 50 origami models/algorithms by memory. Then I am adopted by America. I became somebody. They could make a movie like that, but they don't.

"The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy, as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will try to establish the best that the people can bear.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit: and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and human society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder."

Essay on Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith

Throughout history, just being literate is a sign of wealth.

There's no elitism in chess.  Success is determined by motivation, determination, and open mindedness.  When I was in high school, we were in an interscholastic league with much richer towns and elite prep schools (Boston area), but we trained harder, studied harder, and pushed each other to improve every day, so our team was by far the best in that league.  Our club ace (who wasn't an honors student) practiced blindfold and even played Kreigspiel on occasion.  If we had teachers out sick on a given day, I'd grab a set from the club room and play during the resultant study hall periods against our club's second board (I was our third).  We played as much as we could against the strongest players we could find.

The students I see excel in my local club today are similarly of modest means.  What separates the ones who excel from the ones who don't is motivation.  Nearly every student I teach improves at roughly the same rate at first, the ones who keep at it get really good really fast.  Both kids and adults often give up on it for a variety of reasons, but all of those reasons relate to a lack of motivation.

Some quit because they don't win enough soon enough, others quit because after a few lessons they steamroll their friends and their friends don't want to play anymore.  The ones who stick around see a strong opponent as a mountain to be climbed.  The challenge itself is motivation enough for them.  All such players will meet with reasonable success.

Chess is the tip of the iceberg.

What about healthcare and education? If you cannot afford doctors or studies for you or your family, life's gonna be complicated, to say the least.

And before someone yells "Communist!"  Europe is not communist, yet it grants benefits for all its citizens, countries like Spain have free and universal healthcare and others like Germany make superior studies affordable to everyone.

That's some privileged comment right there, claiming there is no elitism, yet your school had a chess program and resources allocated to it. Some schools have none of that, thus the kids that want to play, cannot and do not have the means to get their shot at junior championships.

I believe I read this article recently just about this topic, I will see if I can find it.

Here it is, https://chess24.com/en/read/news/acp-proposes-change-to-elitist-world-championship-cycle