Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester

Spend enough time studying the “racial equity” and “ethnic studies” programs sweeping school districts across the nation and you’ll find that they are following in the footsteps, on a several-year delay, of one of America’s most progressive cities: Seattle.

It’s worth examining, then, how all that worked out in Seattle. Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better.

At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.

Castro-Gill, it turned out, was a perennially unhappy toxic liar, one who misrepresented her background to the point that her own father compared her to Rachel Dolezal, and who was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct. A focus on racial oppression did not create resiliency, but rather despondency, with Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders going on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 alone.

As Castro-Gill used children for politics in the workplace, her personal life also raised questions about the costs that can incur. She married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him. Then, her previous ex-husband told me, she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.

The academic achievement of Seattle’s youth plummeted as she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on “power and oppression.” But in this world, there was no such thing as failing: Those gaps were used to justify still more jobs and efforts like hers.

What follows, the never-before-told story of America’s first “woke” school system, is excerpted from a new book on the failures of America’s public schools, Race To The Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Education.

Second Life

In June 1997, a 36-year-old child molester named Brian Gill was released from a Washington state prison after serving time for repeatedly abusing his eight-year-old cousin. Gill spent his days immersed in a computer game called Second Life, where players create idealized images of themselves and interact with others’ false personas. There, he met a woman named Tracy, who was fourteen years his junior. Tracy’s avatar became the “submissive” to Brian’s “dominant” in violence-tinged online sex games.

In real life, Tracy Hammond was a classic California housewife, a stay-at-home mother of three whose husband provided for her. She and her husband Ron, a handyman, had been high school sweethearts. One night at 3 a.m., Ron woke up and found her sitting in front of her computer, entranced by the game. “You’re the only man that ever earned my respect,” he watched her type to Brian. Soon after, Tracy told Ron she was going to Vegas for the weekend with a girlfriend. Then that friend called Ron looking for her. By Monday, Ron filed for divorce.

Tracy wanted to take their four-year-old daughter and move to Seattle to live with Brian. The judge overseeing the custody case barred the girl’s move and ordered that the minor have no contact with the sex offender. Tracy said she was going anyway; she would leave her only daughter behind.

In Seattle in 2013, Tracy received a master’s degree in education and became a substitute teacher. She increasingly inhabited a Second Life-style parallel universe. The Seattle area is one of the most progressive and wealthiest in America, but in Tracy’s version, “white supremacy” was omnipresent. The reason she was “so angry all of the time” was that “our students are dying from violence, because they are dismissed regularly in their classrooms.” She was tired, but “I think I figured out why. I am under attack. All women, but especially womxn of color, are under attack.”

She had a new name, a colorful world of villains, and an explanation for a lifetime of unhappiness. “My name is Tracy Castro-Gill,” she proclaimed. “I am Xicana, chingona, and pissed off.” In this world, she was the hero. Teachers gravitated toward her as she laid out an inspiring story.

“I’m angry, because when I was in high school, I wasn’t encouraged to succeed… it was all Shakespeare and Whiteness,” she said.

Tracy’s closest connection to Spanish-speaking culture may be her similarity to Don Quixote, the fictional warrior who attacked windmills believing he was doing battle with ferocious giants.

In this telling of her life story, Castro-Gill grew up in poverty and was homeless. Her father, she said, was a Hispanic who betrayed his identity by being what she called a “U.S. nationalist,” which made their home “intolerable.” To avoid “assimilation” and show that she was authentically Hispanic, her new history went, Castro-Gill joined a gang and began using