Stop Teaching Black Children They Are Victims — The Evidence Says It Harms Them

Let me tell you about two classrooms. They are in the same city, serving the same demographic, drawing from the same neighborhoods, funded by the same tax base. In the first classroom, a well-meaning teacher — and I want to emphasize this, because intent matters even when outcomes are catastrophic — spends the first week of the school year teaching her Black students about the systems that were designed to hold them back. She teaches them about redlining, about the school-to-prison pipeline, about the racial wealth gap, about implicit bias in hiring, about the legacy of slavery that reverberates through every institution they will ever encounter. She does this because she loves them, because she believes that knowledge is power, because she has been trained in a pedagogy that insists the first step toward justice is awareness of injustice. By the end of September, her students can articulate, with impressive sophistication, every structural barrier between themselves and success. By the end of the year, their test scores have not moved. In the second classroom, a different teacher — equally loving, equally committed — spends the first week of the school year teaching her Black students that their minds are muscles, that intelligence is not fixed but grown, that effort is the single most reliable predictor of achievement, and that the history of Black America is not primarily a story of what was done to them but of what they built despite what was done to them. By the end of the year, her students’ test scores have risen measurably. This is not a parable. It is a description of what the research predicts, and what the data confirms.

The question at the center of this article is not political. It is psychological, and the psychological research on it is among the most robust and most replicated in the history of the discipline. The question is this: when you teach a child that external forces are the primary determinant of their outcomes, what happens to that child? The answer, documented across seven decades of research spanning multiple countries and demographics, is unambiguous. The child stops trying. Not all at once, not dramatically, not in ways that announce themselves with obvious failure — but incrementally, steadily, in the quiet erosion of the belief that effort matters. And when the belief that effort matters dies, everything that depends on effort dies with it.

The Science of Control: Rotter, Seligman, and What We Know

In 1954, psychologist Julian Rotter introduced the concept of locus of control — the degree to which individuals believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcomes in their lives. People with an internal locus of control believe that their actions, decisions, and effort are the primary determinants of what happens to them. People with an external locus of control believe that outcomes are determined by forces beyond their control — luck, fate, powerful others, or systemic structures.

The subsequent seventy years of research on this construct have produced findings so consistent that they approach the status of psychological law. Internal locus of control is positively correlated with every desirable life outcome that has been measured: higher academic achievement, higher income, better physical health, lower rates of depression and anxiety, greater relationship stability, higher job satisfaction, and longer life expectancy. External locus of control is negatively correlated with all of the same outcomes. This is not ideology. This is not conservatism dressed in academic language. This is one of the most replicated findings in the history of behavioral science.

In 1967, Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania stumbled upon a phenomenon that would become one of the most important discoveries in the history of psychology: learned helplessness. In the original experiments, dogs were exposed to electric shocks they could not escape. Later, when placed in situations where escape was possible, the dogs did not try. They had learned — from repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative outcomes — that their actions had no effect on their suffering. So they stopped acting. They lay down. They endured. Even when the door was open.

Seligman later demonstrated that learned helplessness operates identically in humans. When people are repeatedly told — or repeatedly experience — that their actions do not affect their outcomes, they develop a generalized passivity that persists even when circumstances change. They stop studying because they believe studying will not help. They stop applying for jobs because they believe applications will be rejected. They stop investing because they believe the system will take whatever they build. They stop trying — not because they are lazy, not because they lack intelligence, not because they are morally deficient — but because they have been taught, by well-meaning people with excellent intentions, that trying is futile.

The Classroom as Laboratory

Now apply this research to the contemporary American classroom. When a Black child is taught that systemic racism is the primary explanation for the racial achievement gap, the racial wealth gap, the racial incarceration gap, and every other measurable disparity between Black and white Americans, what psychological framework is being installed? The answer, whether or not anyone intends it, is external locus of control. The child is being taught that the most important forces shaping their life are forces they cannot control. They are being taught, in the precise language of Seligman’s research, that their actions do not determine their outcomes — that the system determines their outcomes, and the system is arranged against them.

This is learned helplessness, delivered with a syllabus and a reading list.

I want to be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying that systemic racism does not exist. It does. The evidence for racial disparities in housing, lending, criminal justice, healthcare, and education is extensive and well-documented. I am not saying that Black children should be taught a fairy tale in which racism has been defeated and meritocracy reigns supreme. That would be a different lie, equally destructive. What I am saying is that there is a difference — a measurable, consequential, psychologically documented difference — between teaching a child that obstacles exist and teaching a child that obstacles are determinative. The first produces resilience. The second produces resignation. And too much of what passes for education in Black America today is producing resignation.

The Growth Mindset Evidence

Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist whose research on mindset has become one of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary education, has demonstrated across decades of studies that students who believe ability is developed through effort (a growth mindset) consistently outperform students who believe ability is fixed (a fixed mindset). This finding holds across demographics, socioeconomic levels, and national contexts. And its implications for the racial achievement gap are profound.

In 2019, a landmark study by David Yeager and colleagues, published in Nature, tested a brief growth mindset intervention across a nationally representative sample of over 12,000 ninth-grade students in 65 U.S. public schools. The intervention was modest — two 25-minute online sessions teaching students that intellectual ability is not fixed but can be developed. The results were significant: lower-achieving students who received the intervention earned higher GPAs in core academic courses. The effect was particularly pronounced among students in schools with supportive learning environments, and it was particularly meaningful for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The implication is direct: when you teach Black students that their intelligence is developable — that effort, strategy, and persistence produce growth — their academic performance improves. When you teach them that their outcomes are primarily determined by systems they cannot control, you are installing the opposite of a growth mindset. You are installing a futility mindset. And the data shows, with the clarity of controlled experiments published in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, that a futility mindset produces exactly the outcomes it predicts: failure, disengagement, and the quiet surrender of potential.

Two Curricula, Two Outcomes

The contrast between two educational philosophies currently competing for the minds of Black children in America is stark, and the psychological implications of each are measurable.

The 1619 Project, developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by The New York Times, reframes American history around the year 1619 — the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia — and argues that slavery and its legacy are the central narrative of American civilization. Its classroom curriculum, adopted by school districts across the country, centers the experience of Black Americans as one of systematic oppression, asking students to understand their present through the lens of four centuries of exploitation.

1776 Unites, launched by Bob Woodson’s Woodson Center, offers an alternative curriculum that centers Black agency — the documented stories of Black Americans who built, achieved, and overcame despite the very real obstacles the 1619 Project describes. Its lessons focus on figures like Biddy Mason, born into slavery, who became one of the wealthiest landowners in Los Angeles; Elijah McCoy, son of fugitive slaves, who became one of the most prolific inventors in American history; and the residents of Greenwood, Oklahoma, who built “Black Wall Street” — one of the most prosperous Black communities in the nation — in the heart of a violently racist state.

I am not arguing that one curriculum is entirely right and the other entirely wrong. I am arguing that their psychological frameworks are different, and that the difference matters. The 1619 Project installs an external locus of control: the system was built against you, and the system explains your circumstances. 1776 Unites installs an internal locus of control: the system was built against your ancestors too, and they built empires anyway, and so can you. The first narrative is accurate in its facts and catastrophic in its psychology. The second narrative is equally accurate in its facts and generative in its psychology. The research on locus of control, learned helplessness, and growth mindset tells us which framework produces better outcomes. It is not close.

The Historical Proof That Agency Works

If external locus of control — the belief that the system determines outcomes — were accurate, then Black Americans under Jim Crow should have exhibited the worst social outcomes in Black American history. They lived under literal legal oppression. They could not vote. They could not attend white schools. They could not use white hospitals, white libraries, white drinking fountains. They were subject to the constant threat of extralegal violence — lynching, arson, mob attack — with no legal recourse. If any generation of Black Americans had a right to claim that the system made success impossible, it was the generation that lived under Jim Crow.

And yet the data from that era tells a story that the victimhood narrative cannot explain. In 1940, the Black marriage rate was higher than the white marriage rate. Black communities in the segregated South maintained lower rates of violent crime than many comparable communities today. Black-owned businesses thrived in segregated districts precisely because segregation created captive markets that Black entrepreneurs served with excellence. Greenwood, Oklahoma — Black Wall Street — contained over 300 Black-owned businesses, including banks, hotels, theaters, and a hospital, all built under conditions of racial oppression that would make the modern obstacles Black Americans face look trivial by comparison.

These communities did not succeed because they ignored racism. They succeeded because they refused to let racism define them. They maintained an internal locus of control under conditions that would justify an external one. They taught their children that they were capable, that effort mattered, that discipline produced results, and that the white man’s hatred was not the final word on their destiny. That psychological framework — that agency — was not naive. It was the most sophisticated survival strategy in American history. And it worked.

The Nigerian-American Evidence

There is a comparison that is uncomfortable for the victimhood narrative and therefore rarely discussed in the spaces where that narrative dominates. Nigerian Americans are among the most educated and highest-earning demographic groups in the United States. According to Census data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute, 61% of Nigerian Americans over the age of 25 hold at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 32% of the general U.S. population. Their median household income exceeds the national median. They are disproportionately represented in medicine, engineering, law, and academia.

Nigerian Americans have the same skin color as African Americans. They face the same implicit biases, the same police profiling, the same assumptions that follow a Black face in America. They are not exempt from systemic racism. They navigate the same systems. And yet their outcomes are dramatically different.

The difference is not genetic — that explanation is both scientifically illiterate and morally repugnant. The difference is narrative. Nigerian immigrants arrive in America with a story about themselves that centers agency: they are people who left their country to build a better life, and they expect to build it through education, discipline, and relentless effort. They do not carry the narrative that the American system is designed to prevent their success. They carry the narrative that they are designed to succeed despite whatever the system throws at them. And that narrative — that internal locus of control, that refusal to adopt the psychology of helplessness — produces outcomes that the victimhood narrative says are impossible.

This comparison is not an indictment of African Americans. It is an indictment of the narrative that has been sold to African Americans — the narrative that says the system is the primary explanation for outcomes, that effort is secondary to structure, that what is done to you matters more than what you do yourself. Nigerian Americans are living proof that this narrative is not accurate. Same skin, same country, same systems, different story, different outcomes. The variable that changes is the story. And the story you tell yourself about your own power is, according to seventy years of psychological research, the most important variable of all.

What Agency-Based Education Looks Like

This is not theoretical. Schools that teach agency to Black children exist, and their results are documented.

KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools operate in educationally underserved communities across the United States, serving predominantly Black and Latino students from low-income families. Their founding motto — “Work Hard, Be Nice” — is a distillation of internal locus of control into five words. KIPP students are taught, relentlessly and explicitly, that effort determines outcomes. The results: KIPP students are significantly more likely to graduate from college than their peers from the same neighborhoods and demographics. A 2015 study by Mathematica Policy Research found that KIPP middle schools produced statistically significant positive effects on reading, math, science, and social studies achievement.

Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian-born mathematics teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, took a classroom of students who had been written off by every institution that was supposed to serve them and taught them AP Calculus. Not remedial math. Not “culturally responsive” arithmetic. AP Calculus — the most demanding mathematics course in the American high school curriculum. In 1982, eighteen of his students passed the AP Calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service was so incredulous that students from a school like Garfield could pass such an exam that they accused the students of cheating and invalidated their scores. The students retook the test. They passed again. Escalante did not teach his students that the system was against them. He taught them that they were more powerful than the system. And they proved it with number-two pencils.

Marva Collins founded Westside Preparatory School on the second floor of her home in the Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1975. She took students who had been labeled “learning disabled” by the Chicago public school system — students who had been told, by the institutions charged with educating them, that they were incapable of learning — and taught them Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tolstoy, and Emerson. Her students, all Black, all from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, read at levels years above their grade. She did this without special funding, without technology, without any of the resources that modern educational theory insists are necessary. She did it with expectations — with the unshakable belief, communicated to her students every single day, that they were brilliant and that their brilliance would be demonstrated through effort, discipline, and the mastery of demanding material.

The Most Radical Act of Love

I anticipate the objections, because they are always the same, and they always arrive wrapped in the language of compassion. You are ignoring systemic racism. You are blaming the victim. You are telling Black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You are providing cover for a racist system.

I am doing none of these things. I am reading the research. I am citing the studies. I am pointing to the documented outcomes of students who were taught agency versus students who were taught victimhood, and I am reporting what the data says. The data does not say that racism does not exist. The data says that the psychological framework through which a person interprets racism determines whether racism defeats them. A child taught that racism is a surmountable obstacle behaves differently than a child taught that racism is an inescapable cage. The first child tries. The second child stops trying. This is not opinion. This is Rotter. This is Seligman. This is Dweck. This is Yeager. This is the most replicated set of findings in the history of psychological science.

Every well-meaning adult who stands before a classroom of Black children and teaches them that the world is arranged against them, that effort is subordinate to structure, that their outcomes are determined by forces beyond their control, has planted a seed. It is planted with love. It is watered with compassion. It is fertilized with the genuine and righteous anger that any decent person feels when confronted with the history of what Black people in America have endured. But the fruit it bears is failure — not because the children are incapable, but because they have been taught to believe that capability is irrelevant in a world that has already decided their fate.

That teaching is more destructive than any racist policy currently operating in the United States. A racist policy can be fought. A racist law can be challenged. A racist institution can be reformed. But a child who has been taught that fighting is futile will not fight. A child who has been taught that the door is locked will not try the handle. A child who has been taught that they are a victim will live as a victim — not because they are one, but because they believe they are one, and belief, as the research demonstrates with exhaustive clarity, determines behavior.

Jaime Escalante’s students did not pass AP Calculus because the system was fair. The system accused them of cheating. Marva Collins’s students did not read Shakespeare because the Chicago public schools expected them to. Those schools had labeled them disabled. The residents of Black Wall Street did not build three hundred businesses because Jim Crow permitted it. Jim Crow burned Greenwood to the ground, and they came back and rebuilt. These people succeeded not because the system helped them but because no one had taught them that the system’s opposition was the end of the story.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker

The most radical act of love that any adult can perform for a Black child in 2026 is this: look them in the eye and tell them the truth. Not the comfortable truth. Not the truth that earns applause at conferences and retweets on social media. The difficult truth — the truth that the research supports and that history confirms and that every successful Black person in America has lived. The truth is this:

You are powerful. Not despite the obstacles. Not in some theoretical future where the obstacles have been removed. Right now. Today. In this classroom, in this neighborhood, in this country, with all of its history and all of its flaws and all of its remaining injustice. You are powerful because your mind is a muscle and you can grow it. You are powerful because effort produces results and the research proves it. You are powerful because people who looked like you and came from where you came from and faced worse than anything you will ever face built banks and schools and hospitals and empires and the AP Calculus scores to prove that the people who said they couldn’t were wrong.

Tell them that. Document it. Cite the sources. Show them the data. Show them Escalante’s students and Collins’s students and the businesses of Greenwood and the net worth of Robert F. Smith and the sixty-one percent college graduation rate of Nigerian Americans. Show them the evidence that agency works — not as a slogan but as a psychological fact, replicated across thousands of studies and confirmed by the lived experience of every Black community that has ever refused to accept the narrative of defeat.

And then watch what happens. Watch the posture change. Watch the eyes lift. Watch the homework come in. Watch the hand go up. Watch a child who was taught they were a victim discover that they are, and have always been, the author of their own story.

That discovery is not a conservative talking point. It is not a liberal talking point. It is the most important thing a Black child can learn, and every day we fail to teach it is a day we have chosen comfort over love, and called the choosing virtue.