I would like to thank Nicholas Stix for his March Correspondence (“Letter From New York City: The War on White Teachers”). I taught foreign language in a public high school until about five years ago. We had an incident in which a custodian, who was also part of the administration friendship circle, physically threatened one of my fellow teachers for bringing up an issue involving the distribution of stipend positions for activities and sports in our school. The inquiry showed that the principal was illegally giving out the extra positions to people not covered by our contract. As a result, the custodian lost a few stipends. The custodian then turned on this German teacher. He chased her down the hall, followed her into the women’s lounge, shaking his fist, and told her what he’d do to her.

The custodian was black, the foreign language teacher was white. And you have already probably guessed what happened: the white teacher was deemed the problem. Word soon spread that the foreign language department was racist. The result? The foreign language department has been overturned and its members replaced by less competent teachers—most of us left.

The technique works well; play the race card, and you seldom lose. Without this method, the politicization of our schools might not have been so easy.

        —Marty Gale
Mercer Island, WA