“You’ll fit right in,” she replied.

I took the ticket and worked hard to fit in. I played varsity football. I interned on Wall Street. I worked in Washington in the early years of the Obama administration. I went to Harvard Business School, where I started a nonprofit to support small-business owners.

But one story like mine or one Landry scholar does not mean the system works. It doesn’t. Children suffer because we have starved their schools and neighborhoods of resources. And because we have convinced them that their only hope is an assimilation that demands they forsake who they are and where they come from.

The reality is that a kid from my neighborhood is expected to earn $21,000 a year — less than his or her parents were expected to make. Across the country, 13 million children, from every ethnicity, live in households without enough to eat, and one in every 30 children doesn’t have a stable household at all.

When we highlight those few against-all-odds stories, we send the message that all it takes to succeed is grit and resilience and willpower. We tell kids that if they don’t succeed, it’s their fault — not the inevitable outcome of a decades-old program of structural cruelty advanced by neoliberals and conservatives, not to mention the centuries of white supremacy on which the nation was founded.

We sensationalize a school like Landry as a miracle when it seems to work, as a crime scene when it doesn’t. And that’s abetted by an ecosystem of Ivy League admissions committees and media outlets that fetishize kids who have escaped their seemingly doomed environment but pathologize those kids who don’t.

There is another secret, too: The American dream can also destroy people who make it “out.”

I had achieved, by my late 20s, about everything a kid is supposed to, but I was cracked up by the process. So were many of my friends. Before I finished my book about that experience, one of my closest friends from Yale, who’d made a similar Horatio Alger journey, took his own life.

He came to me in a dream a few months later and told me: “You know, we did a lot of things we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do.” I knew what he meant. If you catch it from the right angle, a kid picking himself up by his bootstraps can look like a suicide.