Theodore Dalrymple reports the same about intelligent people (mostly white, sometimes Indian) in the slums of England. Their culture, including their schools, has no place for a person who wants to learn.
A smart, poor boy like Richard Feynman, from a culture that valued intellectual achievement, in a school system that rewarded ability with more challenging work, became a great physicist. A smart, poor boy in an anti-intellectual culture, with schools that pour resources onto the least able and the least motivated, is likely to turn criminal or deeply depressed.
Once I asked a class of black college students what they thought would happen if a black baby were born, in the middle of a ghetto, and entered the world with brain cells the same as those with which Albert Einstein was born.He might grow up to be a Thomas Sowell . . .