The No College Club
Spencer J. Quinn
The White People’s Press, 2023

There is probably no other area in which nationalists are as far behind their opponents as in cultural influence, or what Kevin MacDonald has called the “shaping of ways of seeing.” Both the books our young people read in school and the entertainment they consume in their leisure hours is filled with messaging hostile to us, something its producers are fully conscious of and take great pride in. Much of our effort in this domain necessarily takes the form of reacting against such cultural products: protecting young people from such material where this is still possible, supplementing it with fuller information, or reinterpreting it in accordance with our own views and interests (as with Trevor Lynch’s writings on cinema). But eventually our people shall have to take up “content creation” ourselves.

Spencer J. Quinn, a regular contributor to Counter-Currents, The Occidental Observer, and The Occidental Quarterly, is rising to this challenge. He has already produced an adult novel, Charity’s Blade, and a children’s book entitled My Mirror Tells a Story. His new book under review here is apparently the first-ever effort at nationalist Young Adult fiction, meaning fiction primarily aimed at those in the 12–18 age group. While I would certainly like to see adolescents reading the book, it might be even more important at this stage for nationalists in general to take a look at it as an example of the sort of thing that needs to be done.

Spencer Quinn Interviewed by Pox Populi. Topics include No College Club, Dissident Literature, Race, History, and Slavery

Plot Summary

The novel centers around Caroline Adams, an eleventh-grade student at a rapidly diversifying high school. When we meet her, she is part of a group of four girls that her mother jokingly calls “the clique,” dominated by a loud, socially aggressive Black girl named Medina.

As the novel begins, Caroline is trying to get to class through a gauntlet of leering Black boys, which she eventually manages with the aid of a likeable boy named Brock. He explains to her that he is acting as her “beard”—slang for a fake boyfriend useful for keeping troublemakers at a distance. She then slips into her American History class.

The teacher, Dr. Nogimbe, is a militant Black woman whose lessons focus heavily on slavery. She announces a new group project to be carried out by groups of four students. The topics students can choose from are the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and plantation life.

Today’s lesson is about the Clotilda, said to be the last ship to bring slaves to the United States. As the teacher sermonizes them, the Black students become angry and some of the White girls cry or hide their faces.

Cudjo Lewis was one of the last survivors of the Clotilda,” Dr. Nogimbe continued. “We have a record of his life from the late 1920s. He was born in 1841 in a town called Banté in West Africa, in what’s now the country of Benin. His people were peaceful, civilized, and agricultural. And for the sin of being a black African, he was snatched from his home, bound head and foot, and taken onboard the Clotilda. And then they set sail for a life of slavery and misery in the United States, where all men and women are supposedly created equal.

A scruffy-looking White boy named Derek asks about the life expectancy in Africa. Cudjo Lewis lived to 95 in America, he points out, whereas the life expectancy in today’s Benin is only 61 (and was probably lower in Lewis’s own day). So in some ways, Blacks did better under slavery in the US than in their native Africa. Furthermore, Lewis was enslaved by fellow Blacks, not by Whites. Derek knows this because, unlike most of his classmates, he has actually read the assigned book.

Dr. Nogimbe does not respond well to his remarks: he is sent to the principal’s office amid hoots of “racist” and “Nazi.” But Caroline knows Derek is correct about Blacks selling other Blacks as slaves, because she too has actually read the assignment. Having lunch with “the clique” that day, she makes this point, but the response from the Black girl Malik is no more gracious than Dr. Nogimbe’s had been in class: she gets up and demonstratively walks away from the now “racist” Caroline, followed meekly by the others. This draws the attention of the entire lunchroom, and Caroline is soon fighting back tears.

Rather than sit alone, Caroline seeks refuge with a nerdy, bookish girl named Rose whom she had previously looked down upon, but who seemed to have been enjoying the spectacle of Derek’s defiance in class earlier. Rose turns out to have read the assigned text as well, so she knew the point that had now got both Derek and now Caroline into trouble was perfectly true. Caroline is grateful for the moral support.

Soon Brock, Caroline’s “beard” from earlier, sits down with them and asks Caroline to tell him what had happened with Derek in class, which has by now led to swirling, school-wide rumors. Brock had seen the aftermath: Derek nearly got expelled for “educational disruption” when he refused to apologize to the teacher for telling the truth about what was stated in the book.

[The Principal] told him straight: One more screwup and he’s out.”

Caroline fell back in her chair, shocked. “Then he’s not going to college.”

“He won’t be able to get a job anywhere,” Rose added. “Not a real one.”

“He’ll be called a Nazi or white supremacist, and that will be that,” Brock said. “It’ll be on his record. Military won’t take him. Law enforcement, forget about it. It will be really hard for him.”

“That’s so unfair.”

Caroline shook her head. “It’s evil.”

“And it could happen to any of us as well,” Brock said.

Caroline notices that Brock seems to be ignoring Rose. When she points this out, his response is to pick up an apple from Rose’s tray and take a large bite out of it. He also calls her the “goofball queen.” Later, when they are alone, an outraged Caroline asks Brock why he dislikes Rose so much. Brock explains that he likes Rose and that his rude behavior is “game”—a strategic use of reverse psychology designed to intrigue her.

Caroline is surprised that Derek has “put his future at risk for something as abstract as the truth,” and wonders if this bears some relation to what her grandparents called “honor.” Wanting to speak to Derek later that day, but not knowing what to say, she blurts out “Would you like to be part of our group for Dr. Nogimbe’s project?” Derek accepts, and says he already has an idea for the project: “It’s such an awesome idea, it’ll get us all kicked out of school!”

Riding home on the schoolbus that afternoon, Caroline discovers that most of her social media “friends” have suddenly dropped her—a major crisis for a teenage girl sensitive about her popularity. She understood instantly that Medina was behind it.

She then checked her messages. As expected, people were heaping the most vile abuse on her. She was a racist, a redneck, a Nazi, a White supremacist. There was no end to it. And it was almost all vulgar and profane. Would colleges find out? What about employers?

Derek sits down next to her to sell her on his project idea that will get them all kicked out of school: to look for accounts by American slave owners—to get their perspective on the South’s peculiar institution. Caroline tells him this is “the stupidest idea I have ever heard,” and that Brock and Rose agree with her. Doesn’t Derek want to graduate and go on to college? To her surprise, this argument does not seem decisive to Derek. When she persists in rejecting his idea for their project, he gets angry and tell her: “You’re just like all the others. I hope you and

all your snooty friends graduate college and marry millionaires.” Caroline reflects on the unfairness of Derek’s anger at her. Her defense of what he had said in class was the cause of her new pariah status, after all.

Caroline’s mother Joan is a conventional liberal whom Caroline knows will not be pleased to learn her daughter had defended a “racist” at school. But something even worse happens: Joan’s Black supervisor has gotten wind of Medina’s version of events, viz., that Caroline had been “defending racism and slavery,” and is now trying to get her fired. This could create serious financial problems for the entire family. Without asking Caroline for her side of the story, she demands that Caroline apologize to all and sundry for her “racism.”

Caroline counters that her mother should instead fight the injustice looming over her.

“They have no right to do this to you! You didn’t do anything wrong! If they fire you, find a lawyer and sue.”

“I can’t afford that, Caroline! I work for a big company. They have lawyers on staff.”

“Then we need some kind of organization that also has lawyers on staff.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A group of professionals, activists. I don’t know! An organization that can fight for people like us.”

“People like who?”

Caroline considered her response before responding. “white people,” she whispered.

Caroline soon recalls that her mother’s Black supervisor’s son once committed armed robbery—with no adverse effect on that woman’s employment.

Caroline has barely gained the upper hand in her confrontation with her mother when Derek, Brock and Rose unexpectedly show up at the door. Derek announces: “My uncle owns a house near where he lives that was a real plantation! With slaves and everything. He said we can explore. Take video. He’s got tons of information about it.” With some misgivings, Joan gives Caroline permission to join her new friends in gathering material for their class project.

Two hours later, the four drive up to the home of Derek’s Uncle Zack, a local history buff and tour guide. Zack explains:

The house we will visit today we think was constructed in the 1760s near a place called Kelly’s Ford. I bought it and the surrounding forty acres from the state of Virginia a few months ago. Ain’t much of it left, but what we do know is that its owner, Ernest Shackleford, operated a 120-acre farm and owned about a dozen slaves up until the Revolutionary War. Accordin’ to court records and at least one eyewitness account, he didn’t treat ‘em well.

Arriving at the site, which is little more than a ruin, Uncle Zack mentions that many of the slaves were “indentured servants.” Brock and Derek, knowing that indentured servants were White, fear they have come “all this way for nothing.”

Derek blinked twice. “Uncle Zack, I told you this project is about slavery. I emailed you the assignment our teacher gave us.”

Zack took another puff. “I read it. All it talked about was slavery. Didn’t say nuthin’ ‘bout Black or White.”

Zack explains that indentured servants were slaves. While their terms of service were theoretically limited, many were driven so hard they did not live to see the end, and others had their service legally or illegally extended beyond their contract of indenture. Derek and Brock continue to object that indentured servitude cannot compare with Black slavery.

“Son, it did,” Zack said patiently. “Hundreds of thousands of White indentured servants died in bondage durin’ the colonial period. Hundreds of thousands of White men, women, and children were abducted and sent to America as slaves. Many were convicts, yes. But many were also homeless or political dissidents or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And because white slaves were so cheap to acquire, black slaves in many places were worth more.”

Being worth more, owners had an incentive to treat them better, whereas with White indentured servants the incentive was to get the maximum possible work out of them for as long as they could be kept in bondage.

The four friends gradually reconsider their ideas about colonial history, but foresee that this new information is not likely to go over well with Dr. Nogimbe.

Zack mentions that a few years previously, archaeologists had found the skeletal remains of a seventeen-year-old boy on the property:

They dated the remains to the 1770s and noted the herniated discs in the spine, a once-broken collar bone, and other injuries which indicated many years of hard labor. The back of his skull had been severely damaged, implying a violent death, perhaps even a homicide. The archaeologists assumed this boy had been a Black slave, but were shocked when tests revealed that he was Northern European, most likely English.

Indeed, all but one of the slaves on the Shackleford plantation appear to have been White.

While investigating a part of the property Zack had warned her to avoid as too dangerous, Caroline comes across a mysterious old manuscript. The title reads: “The Memoir of an Unfortunate Young Man, Abducted on the Docks of Brighton, and Forced to Live as a White Slave for 5 Years in the Virginia Colony Until His Providential Escape and Redemption.” This turns out to have been the work of the seventeen-year-old buried on the property: one of the White slaves/indentured servants Zack had been telling them about.

Five chapters of The No College Club consist of excerpts from this eighteenth-century memoir. It becomes the principal basis of the group’s school presentation, which triggers first a riot, then the expulsion of all four of them. Their families sue on the grounds of racial discrimination and improper expulsion, but the school district has deep pockets and does all it can to drag out the process.

As the book’s title implies, however, Caroline, Rose, Brock and Derek end up being forced by necessity to learn that it is possible to lead successful and happy lives without going into crippling debt to subject themselves to four years of racial abuse.

Conclusion

In general, The No College Club is a good first effort. The criticism I felt most often tempted to make while reading it is that it attempts to pack as much nationalist messaging as possible into a fairly short space (I left a fair amount out of this summary). Ideally, I would like to see our people producing material that would be read for its own sake by the general public, in which the message could be assimilated gradually and almost unconsciously amid the more universal themes of school, family, friendship, first love, etc., that is the typical focus of fiction for readers in this age group—in other words, the way our enemies do it. But this is an important example of the kind of thing we need to be doing.