One of my very best friends is a black woman, married to a white guy, and they have two kids together. She is also a teacher and works with “under-performing” students. Although we live on opposite sides of the country, we still call each other regularly and whenever something out-of-the-ordinary happens she knows to pick up the phone and call me. When I arrived home the other day I looked at my and saw that I had missed one of my best friends’ calls. When I called her back, she told me a doozy.

One of my friends’ students had fallen behind on her assignments and my friend was feeling a bit irritated about the situation. My friend told the student that it was very irresponsible to continue to brush off her obligation to complete the assignments. As a retort, the student told my friend that she had been “hanging around those white people for too long, and now she had become uppity.”

At that point my friend said she literally started to see red and had to use every bit of willpower in her body to refrain from snatching that girl up out of her chair and shaking her until she came to her senses. But instead of dishing out a beat down, my friend just sat down at her desk to cool off before trying to reengage with the student in another attempt to explain the importance of completing all of your school work on-time.

Since my friend couldn’t give the girl an earful, she gave that earful to me instead. “Why does having a work ethic have to be something only white people have?! Why does this child have the opinion that black people are supposed to do the bare minimum, then when they get fired they should complain to the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) about being discriminated against? Where do these ideas come from? It’s ridiculous!”

Obviousl, the vast majority of the black people in this world do not feel the same as my friends’ student, but for those black people that do feel that way–and are teaching their kids to feel that way–ridding themselves of their inferiority and victim complex’s will be an uphill battle. And it’s a battle that some of them have yet to realize they need to fight.