It is clear that there is an achievement gap between White and Black students’ performance in school, with White students drastically outperforming Black students, on average. This article seeks to identify a factor that contributes to and develop a solution that can help decrease this Black-White achievement gap. This article will consider the argument that Black students lack cultural capital and evaluate the feasibility of the suggestion for them to increase their engagement in middle-class help-seeking behaviors, as a method to help close the achievement gap. By ‘help-seeking behaviors’, this paper specifically refers to students’ actions of raising their hands in class to ask questions to which they do not know the answers or asking their teachers for help with schoolwork. This article will argue that although seeking help can aid Black students in gaining more success in school, American schools currently impede this possibility by not explicitly repudiating the stereotype of Black intellectual inferiority, thereby permitting a hostile environment in which Black students may not feel comfortable engaging in help-seeking. This article recommends that schools teach teachers and students about systemic racism, accurate American history, and social justice as a means to encourage Black students to seek help more frequently. The author of the article interviewed five Black University of Chicago college and graduate students who were instructed in high school classrooms in which their racial group was the minority to test whether racially hostile classroom climates could preclude Black students from seeking help in the classroom.