White Like You Read online

  WHITE LIKE YOU

  by

  SPENCER J. QUINN

  Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

  San Francisco

  2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Spencer J. Quinn

  All rights reserved

  Published in the United States by

  COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.

  P.O. Box 22638

  San Francisco, CA 94122

  USA

  http://www.counter-currents.com/

  ISBNs

  Hardcover: 978-1-940933-73-3

  Paperback: 978-1-940933-74-0

  Electronic: 978-1-940933-75-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Quinn, Spencer, 1976- author.

  Title: White like you / by Spencer J. Quinn.

  Description: San Francisco : Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd., 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017023824 (print) | LCCN 2017032729 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781940933757 (electronic) | ISBN 9781940933733 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

  ISBN 9781940933740 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: White nationalism--Fiction. | White supremacy

  movements--United States--Fiction. | Whites--United States--Politics and

  government--Fiction. | United States--Race relations--Fiction. | Adventure

  stories

  Classification: LCC PS3617.U5845 (ebook) | LCC PS3617.U5845 W55 2017 (print)

  | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023824

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: LITTLE ROCK

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART 2: MUNCIE

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART 3: NATHAN’S FORD

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  PART 4: MEMPHIS

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  PART 5: NATHAN’S FORD

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  PART 6: MUNCIE

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  PART 7: TEHRAN

  Chapter 50

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Part 1: Little Rock

  Chapter 1

  What is a test? Ben Cameron never had to ask because he always knew.

  “I see you have D as the answer,” Phil said, “but A, ‘go extinct,’ could also be right, or at least not wrong. If the bird’s already on the verge of extinction, that is.” Portly and short, Phil slid his pudgy arms on the table and shifted his weight in his seat. Eyebrows over alert sunken eyes pushed up into his bald head like furry crescent moons.

  “But you’re making it seem like mass suicide,” Ben said. “Can a species really react to a new population by going extinct? It seems that extinction is something that happens to a species over time, not something a species can actively achieve.”

  Ben rapped his fingers on his company’s tiny device. Thirteen hundred fifth-grade science test questions, known simply as items, waited on its memory drive. Four months of work producing them for the Arkansas Board of Education. One week in committee with a dozen Arkansas educators to see which ones survive.

  “I agree,” Phil said. “But our curriculum does not require students to interpret extinction like that.”

  “So, it’s possible a kid could know his science and still get the item wrong?” Franklin suggested. “Because he views going extinct as being active rather than passive?” Franklin was a tall, middle-aged man in short sleeves despite the frigid air conditioning. Crossing his long legs alongside the table, pale skin peeked out from where his pant leg ended and his sock began.

  Ben laughed. “You’d have to hack through some hairy logic to come to that conclusion. Arkansas must have some pretty scary fifth graders.”

  Laughter rippled through the hotel conference room leading to weary wisecracking from some of the teachers: “You’d be surprised!” “That’s not all they hack through!” “Scary in other ways!”

  “I’m not saying it’s a bad item, Ben,” Phil said, pointing to the projected document. “It’s just that A will distract kids a little too well.”

  Ben squinted at the item with one eye. “Fair enough. Let’s change A from ‘go extinct’ to ‘interbreed with thin-beaked birds’. The wide beaks certainly can’t do that. Then we’ll change it to B because of its length.”

  Janet nodded. “That will work,” she said. Janet was the committee chair, a serious, middle-aged woman in a navy blue business suit with shoulder pads. Girlish eyes flashed beneath straight dark eyebrows and wavy gray hair. The rest of the committee murmured its assent.

  “So we should accept this one?” Ben asked. He looked over his committee. Some had PhDs. Some were administrators. Others were ordinary teachers who had driven to the Holiday Inn in Little Rock from points across Arkansas, exhausted from travel and clocking their miles. All to pare Ben’s work down to the 700 items they needed for their end-of-year fifth-grade science exam.

  As the teachers studied the projected item, Ben observed with a thin, confident smile. He recited the item from memory:

  “Thin-beaked birds move into a habitat containing a different species of wide-beaked birds. The birds occupy the same level on the food web, but the thin-beaked birds can better compete for food and shelter. What is a possible response from the wide-beaked birds?

  A. prey upon thin-beaked birds.

  B. interbreed with thin-beaked birds.

  C. occupy a lower level on the food web.

  D. migrate to a more hospitable habitat.”

  Silence never sounded so good, Ben thought. This was how he liked his committees, searching for faults in his work and finding none. “Not too shabby,” one of them said.

  “I say go with it,” Franklin said, cracking his knuckles and leaning back.

  “Me too,” said a few others.

  Janet folded her hands beneath her chin. “Another winner. Got the edit, Ben?”

  “Got it,” Ben said, now correcting the item on his device. In seconds the new item manifested before the educators. He then walked around the table, making sure the correction uploaded to their personal devices. Ben was a tall, slender twenty-nine-year-old with thin sideburns and brown hair tousled with a touch of mousse. In his custom suit and designer silk tie, he made a curious waiter for the drably-dressed educators. Their smiles radiated mutual warmth.

  “What does that bring us to, Ben?” Janet asked.

  “I think we’re hovering around ninety percent,” Ben said, sliding back into his chair. He performed some calculations on his device. “90.21 percent accepted. We’ve read 235 items today and got 212 through. At this rate we’ll be done by Thursday. You’ll all go home a day early.”

&nb
sp; A committee member clapped twice and startled everyone. Laughter rumbled and then rolled away as the teachers grabbed their jackets and purses. “Good. Let’s wrap up for today,” Janet said, redundant amid the hubbub.

  “Did you write all these items yourself, Ben?” Phil asked.

  “About 900 of them,” Ben admitted. “Couple item writers took care of the rest.”

  “By item writers you mean independent contractors who write for Benchmark Testing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, good work so far,” Phil said, smiling. The committee members then stopped what they were doing to further congratulate Ben. Their day was over, and they had no obligation to stay, yet they shared with him their frustrations and fears regarding standardized tests. A bad test can do so much damage, they said. Not just to the children but to their schools and communities as well. Teachers also find it frustrating to teach to a test they’re not confident in. They were especially grateful to have someone competent and conscientious like Ben developing it for them.

  Ben cleared his throat, touched by the spontaneity of it all. He had met these people for the first time that morning. He thanked them as graciously as he could and worried he wasn’t being gracious enough. Janet, the ranking educator in the lower school science committee and sitting member of the Arkansas Board of Education, looked askance at him. The stakes were high, and she wanted to see if Ben understood that.

  After a moment, Ben smiled back at her playfully as if to say, “Who? Me?”

  Janet smiled and put her hand to her mouth to stifle a short laugh.

  It was almost four-thirty by the time Ben strolled out of the committee room with his Benchmark Testing Company device in his pocket. The meetings were supposed to last until five, and it was a pretty bold statement to quit early, especially on a Monday. He was hoping his project manager Nigel Polite would see him sauntering the halls. Perhaps this would help persuade the BTC brass to give their star content specialist his much deserved promotion.

  He noticed that the door to the high school science committee room was open. That was odd. He was expecting Benchmark Testing’s new science content specialist Sono Kofi Mensah to still be working with his committee. Born and raised in Ghana but schooled mostly in England and America, Son, as he preferred to be called, had been with BTC only three months. Ben wondered if Son could have finished before him. He didn’t want to be upstaged by anyone, especially a new hire. Still, Son only needed to get 300 items past the committee that week. Ben guessed it was possible.

  He slowed his pace as he approached the room. He could tell it was nearly empty, yet two voices were projecting from it: Nigel’s and a woman’s he’d never heard before. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he could tell that she was interrupting him, bullying him, menacing him almost. Only a high-ranking member of the Arkansas Board of Education could talk to Nigel that way. So much for being upstaged by Son, Ben thought. Something horrible must have happened in the high school committee that day. The scene was made even more cringe-worthy by Nigel’s sycophantic appeals rendered almost eloquent by his Mancunian English accent. Suddenly, looking good next to Son Mensah lost much of its charm for Ben. Thinking of how this might affect Benchmark Testing, small and financially beleaguered company that it was, made him sweat with worry.

  Not wanting to eavesdrop anymore, Ben picked up the pace and whizzed past the door. The only tidbit of information he could catch was that the high school committee had broken for the day at two. Early. If the committee wasn’t passing Son’s items, Ben thought, why would they quit early? Wouldn’t they want to review as many items as possible?

  Still pondering this, Ben passed the doorway of the middle school committee room. It too was open, and at once he noticed the arresting figure of Ariya Mohammadi, BTC’s middle school science content specialist, standing in front of it. A tall woman, she was conversing eye-to-eye with her committee chair, a paunchy, grey-haired man of sixty. Splotchy skin marked his face, and his pants must have been a size too small given how his belly spilled out over them. He seemed keen on extending his conversation with such a majestic woman for as long as he could, even as other committee members were filing past.

  Ariya clearly had a passion for fashion. Her suit, shoes, makeup, and hair all worked in tandem to revamp the attainably attractive woman that she was into something unattainably seductive. In the office Ben snuck looks at her hazel almond eyes and delicate pinup-girl chin whenever he could. Although she was from Iran, her golden fair skin recalled the Mediterranean and made her seem more Greek or Italian. She could have lost fifteen pounds, but Ben was grateful she hadn’t since the extra weight, especially in her breasts and naturally toned arms, seemed to bolster her self-confidence and made her a sweetly fearsome presence at BTC. Meanwhile, a modest tummy roll suggested that an innocent girl lurked somewhere within the alluring curves of her body.

  It was well known in the office that Ariya spent at least half an hour on her appearance each morning with an array of topflight cosmetics and perfumes always present in her tote bag of a purse. Yet she was married and supposedly a devout Muslim. Early birds at BTC would often see her scurrying across the parking lot in her traditional cloak and headscarf only to appear from the ladies’ room a radiant new woman.

  Despite these efforts, Ariya never acted sexy. Never once had Ben seen her flirt or even socialize with colleagues. Rarely did she smile, and she never spoke about herself. She spent most of her time either writing items or barking orders in Farsi to her gaggle of writers back home in Iran. Until Ben’s arrival five years prior, Ariya had been BTC’s most successful content specialist. She was also the costliest since her friends and family were making their fortunes in thirty dollar increments every time she accepted an item. This was BTC’s typical pay per item, about ten dollars less than the industry standard. Rumor had it she wasn’t above accepting inferior items just to keep the money flowing from BTC to Tehran and other points scattered across the former Persian Empire.

  Ben slowed down and noticed something new in her womanly arsenal: orange highlights in her long, lustrous black hair. He paused to take them in until her eyes met his. She had a way of looking at you as if picking through fruit at a grocer’s bazaar. He didn’t want to be the one to pull his eyes away first. She had to, since she was still in conversation. When she looked at him again, he was still looking at her.

  ***

  It was eight-thirty in the evening. Ben had just reclined onto his hotel bed and was paging through a novel about the battle of Thermopylae when startled by sharp knocks on the door. Through the peephole he saw Nigel leaning heavily against the doorframe.

  Ben opened the door. “Nigel, what’s up?”

  “It’s Son,” Nigel said. “He needs your help.” Nigel’s brown hair fell down almost to the bridge of his pelican beak nose, and his laughably fat neck made him seem a month or two away from having to buy a new shirt. His cheeks were a rose-tinted pink.

  Ben had always had a shaky opinion of Son as content specialist. Son often arrived to work late, and his attitude could charitably be referred to as lackadaisical. Ben also could never get a good conversation going with him about science. Rumblings from colleagues who had worked with him only strengthened his suspicions. But Ben was sensitive enough to the racial taboo which followed Son around like a long black shadow not to rumble along with them. He knew such discussions would be distasteful and would stir up unsettling memories about race which he had kept comfortably un-remembered for many years. Despite sensing an impending disaster, Ben was still prepared to give Son the benefit of many, many doubts.

  “Really?” Ben said as he let Nigel in.

  “Unfortunately. His items are crap.”

  “All of them?”

  “Enough of them. We just went over them in his room.”

  Ben rubbed the stubble on his jaw and closed the door, watching his boss pace frantically around the room.

  “Ben, I need you to…” Nigel began, po
inting his finger. He then checked himself, softening his appeal. “Please. If you would be so kind, help Son meet his quota. He needs new items.”

  “New items? You mean, like, from scratch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t he just fix the ones he already wrote?”

  Nigel’s tiny jowls jiggled as he shook his head. “No, he can’t.”

  “Okay. How many items are we talking?”

  “Around 280.”

  “He needs to write 280 items or he needs to get 280 accepted?”

  Nigel clamped his mouth shut before answering. “He needs to get 280 items accepted this week. The Arkansas Education Commissioner chewed me out over this. It wasn’t pleasant.”

  “Was that the lady who had you begging like a cocker spaniel in Son’s committee room this afternoon?” Ben asked, smirking.

  The left half of Nigel’s face lifted in shock. “You were spying?”

  “No. There was a bunch of us in the hall watching the show. I was just selling tickets.”

  Nigel laughed. “That’s not funny. They’re worried about this. If we don’t meet our quota this week, Arkansas won’t have enough for their eleventh grade exam.”

  Ben folded his arms. “And then we lose our contract.”

  “Yes. But not before we fulfill our obligations to them at a loss. And take a big hit reputation-wise.”

  “We can’t afford that, can we?”

  “No,” Nigel sighed. “So, can you do this?”

  Ben threw up his hands. “I have a vacation in San Diego planned for this weekend with friends. I bought plane tickets.”

  “But how would that impact your week here?”

  Ben’s only answer was a chagrined smile.

  “When does your flight leave?” Nigel asked.

  “Thursday evening. I was gonna tell you.”