Consider for a moment what it means for children, not even at the age of puberty, to begin to perceive and comprehend not just bad luck in life or economic hard times but that the country behind the flag they most likely are expected to pledge allegiance to every day betrays its most fundamental values by allowing those sworn to protect and serve to shoot and strangle without being held to account by the laws the flag represents.

Consider for a moment what it means for a future, developing, malleable citizen of a democratic society to be taught with a straight face that even though the founders owned slaves, they considered all men to be created equal. Consider what it means for that child to be told with a straight face that there is such a thing as an American dream even as their daily lives open up more opportunity for the kind of macabre nightmares the most comfortable of us tend to think are reserved for despotic so-called Third World nations.

If Donald Trump ever said one true thing, it might have been that blacks are living in hell, but it’s not for the reasons he seemingly thinks — rather it’s because history and the institutions that history has shaped won’t leave us alone.

The problem when the children are exposed to such tragedy is not only a matter of the emotional trauma they surely face. There is no question this is crucially important. But I want to focus your attention on something that affects our collective self-interest as democratic citizens: What kind of education are we providing the children of black Americans?

They don’t need to sit in the back seat of a car to hear the fear an adult is hiding or be forced to sympathize with the loss of a loved one to begin to grasp the precarity of black life in America. In a tech-savvy society, they can watch YouTube and see how easy it is for a police officer to strangle someone and be home in time for dinner. They can easily see how unwise it is to call the police when you need help — it could turn out they arrive and cause more trouble than is worth inviting, no matter the other dangers you thought surrounded you. A democratic society depends on basic trust and a sense of institutional stability and integrity. But when a society at once calls itself democratic but continues to abuse its minority population, that population’s youngest and most impressionable witnesses would be right to question whether this is a decent society, a democracy, at all.

The fact that young black Americans, the New Orleans students in this case, are clear on the pitfalls of American life does not mean they are without hope. Many expressed the aspiration to attend an Ivy League college, and others held back a tide of racial distrust by quickly pointing out that they had white friends or white teachers they cared for and who cared for them.

Yet, maybe on account of my own weariness, the one letter that has remained in my mind most vividly congratulated me on my own personal success and in the same breath cautioned, “But just remember one thing: Don’t die yet, O.K.?” What can I say to that? Black Americans are clearly not the masters of their destiny in the manner our educational system so enthusiastically portrays the potential power of each American life. One cannot lie to these children — they know better. Diamond Reynolds’s daughter now knows better. The children who were in the apartment when the Seattle police shot and killed Charleena Lyles know better. So why don’t the grown-ups?