Teacher Says “Young Black Girls In School Are All Angry and They Call Themselves Baddies”

A woman who works with schools says she is alarmed by what she describes as growing anger, aggression and bullying among some young Black girls, while commentary YouTuber Anton Daniels argues that the behavior cannot be separated from what children are absorbing at home, online and through the culture around them.

Daniels reacted to a TikTok video from a woman named Lilly G., who said that only a few weeks into the school year she was already seeing students come into school ready to prove themselves through confrontation, with some girls treating aggression as part of a “baddie” identity.

“The kids are so angry,” Lilly said, before focusing particularly on the Black girls she works with. “The need to prove yourself via aggression and low-key bullying that I have seen is astronomical.”

She made clear that she was not criticizing Black girls as a group, saying she loves their personality, energy and “extraness,” but believes something has changed in the way some children are processing what they see in the world around them.

Lilly Says the Anger Is Showing Up Almost Immediately

Lilly said the pattern became obvious almost as soon as the school year began, with students reading ordinary interactions as disrespect and responding defensively before there was much reason to.

At one new school where the students barely knew one another, she said racial tension had already become noticeable, which she found especially troubling because the children had not even had enough time together to build longstanding conflicts.

She described situations where a girl might say another student “looked at me crazy,” and Lilly would have to slow the situation down and suggest that perhaps the other child was simply confused, distracted or trying to figure out where to go.

Her concern was that aggression had become a kind of default posture.

Lilly said some girls seemed to feel they needed to enter a room with what she called “the rah-rah” in order to feel safe, while others were fighting among themselves even when there were relatively few Black students in the school.

“Why are y’all fighting with one another?” she asked. “What are we doing here?”

She also questioned why “baddie” had become associated with fighting and intimidation among children, arguing that the term was beginning to represent something much darker than confidence or self-expression.

That distinction matters because a culture of self-confidence is not the same thing as a culture where children feel they must constantly defend themselves from imagined disrespect. If students are entering classrooms already expecting conflict, even harmless moments can become fuel for another confrontation.

Daniels Blames Home Life and Social Media

Daniels responded by arguing that children do not arrive at school with these attitudes in a vacuum.

He said young students often absorb the anger, stress and unresolved problems of the adults around them, especially when parents openly discuss relationship problems, financial struggles or racial grievances in front of them.

“This is not something that they’ve experienced,” Daniels said of the racial tension Lilly described. “They have not experienced any form of racism whatsoever.”

That was Daniels’ interpretation, and Lilly herself had said that some of the tension appeared to come from the way Black students believed other people viewed them.

Daniels nevertheless argued that much of the hostility begins at home, where children may be exposed to arguments, instability or resentment before bringing those emotions into school.

He placed particular blame on parents who allow children unrestricted access to social media and tablets, saying many children are now being raised as much by online content as by adults.

“The tablets have raised them,” he said.

Daniels also argued that children see much more than parents think they do, including adults insulting former partners online, discussing family conflict publicly and venting about problems that children may not be emotionally prepared to understand.

In his view, young people then reproduce that behavior with less maturity and even fewer filters.

That point is broader than the racial angle of the discussion and probably one of the more useful parts of Daniels’ response. Children have always copied adults, but social media now gives them a constant stream of adult conflict, status games and personal drama that can follow them from home directly into the classroom.

‘Baddie’ Culture and Materialism

Daniels also connected the issue to what he sees as an increasingly materialistic culture among teenagers.

He described overhearing a mother talking about struggling financially while her child wore expensive Christian Dior shoes, then recalled seeing high school students at a restaurant wearing brands such as Balenciaga and Dior.

“What are we raising our children to be?” he asked.

Daniels acknowledged that teenagers have always cared about clothes and looking good, including when he was young, but he questioned why luxury brands costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars have become so normalized among school-age children.

He tied that same status culture to the “baddie” image Lilly described.

After looking at programming and online clips built around fighting, Daniels said he saw young women repeatedly using the “baddie” label while physically confronting one another over minor disputes.

He argued that children are seeing these models of behavior and bringing them into school before they have enough maturity to separate entertainment from reality.

Lilly made a similar point, saying what the girls have lived through, what they see on social media and what they are shown through modern media are all shaping how they behave.

Lilly Says the Literacy Problem Is Just as Serious

For Lilly, the aggression was only part of the concern.

She said some of the same 11-year-olds who know TikTok dances better than many adults cannot write two complete sentences or spell relatively simple words.

“The fact that some of them cannot even write two sentences but know TikTok dances better than me is so sad,” she said.

Lilly described the literacy problem as frightening because these children will eventually have to function independently as adults in a world that may be even more demanding than the one they are growing up in now.

She said people often discuss a literacy crisis in abstract terms, but working directly with children makes the problem feel much more real.

Her goal, she said, is to “pour into them” and help shift their perspectives, attitudes and thought processes rather than simply writing them off as difficult kids.

That is an important part of her message because the clip was not really about condemning children. Lilly repeatedly returned to the idea that adults have to help them change course.

Daniels Says the Children Did Not Create the Problem

Daniels became especially critical of parents as the video continued.

He said children should be protected from adult chaos rather than forced to absorb it, and argued that many young people are carrying problems into school that began long before they walked into a classroom.

“This hurts my heart because the kids didn’t ask to be here,” Daniels said.

He also said that if he were raising a child now, he would strongly consider private Catholic schooling in a single-sex environment because he believes students are surrounded by too many distractions that have little to do with education.

His ideal school environment, he said, would allow children to focus on “reading, writing, learning, having a good time, and trying not to be too socially awkward.”

Whether private or single-sex schooling would solve the kinds of problems Lilly described is a separate question, and the video did not provide evidence for that conclusion.

Still, Daniels’ broader concern was clear: he believes modern children are being asked to carry too much adult culture too early, while basic education and social development are being pushed aside.

A Warning About What Children Are Learning

Lilly’s comments were blunt, but they were also rooted in frustration with what she says she is seeing firsthand among students.

She described young girls who seem ready to interpret ordinary looks or comments as threats, who embrace aggression as part of being a “baddie,” and who sometimes struggle with basic literacy at the same time.

Daniels took that concern and widened it into a criticism of parenting, social media, luxury culture and entertainment built around conflict, sometimes making much broader claims than Lilly herself did.

The two nevertheless agreed on one central point: the children are absorbing something from the world around them, and adults cannot act surprised when that culture begins showing up inside schools.

The more useful response is probably not to treat 11-year-olds as though they are already lost, but to ask why anger, status and confrontation are becoming so attractive to them in the first place.

Lilly said her goal is to help change the way those students see themselves and the people around them, which may be the most practical place to start when the children themselves are still young enough to learn a different way of handling conflict.