Empowering the children or Disheartening them?

I am asking for the advice from my peers (and any who care to give it).  Is informing students of the achievement gap and the structural factors that contribute to the achievement gap a worthwhile effort?  Will it serve to empower my students or will it just dishearten them?

I am personally of the belief that by showing students the truth about their current situation and help them learn about the social, economic and other structural factors that are standing in their way, that I could empower the students to take charge and work harder to get where they want and need to go.  I want them to see their obtaining an education as an act of social justice (and possibly even minor rebellion), something to do both for themselves and society at large. 

On the flip side, this may just make them think that everything is hopeless and out of reach.  I don't want them coming out of this kind of unit thinking that they are less than, that the cards are impossibly stacked against them, that everything is doomed to repeat itself.

Then there are the implementation questions + my initial thoughts on them:

1. Which classes would I present this information to?  I want to say all of them, I can relate this kind of topic to World History, Economics and all my government classes.  But at the same time, that may not be realistic.
   
2. When would I teach this to the students?  I think that this might be something to do near the beginning of the year.  Starting with the personal and working outwards to the global (or national in US Government).  Maybe instead of focusing on the schools I would instead focus on the communities at large and talk about the structural arguments towards both the achievement gap and poverty rates.  Could I get away with spending a week on this kind of unit?  There are many books that students have loved reading in the past (I could get a class set of Our America and also look at books/essays by William Julius Wilson -among others) and begin by showing what social studies can do while working on basic reading and writing skills and issues of social justice that directly pertain to my students.

I may spend some time this summer seeing if I can come up with an excellent and brief introductory week-long unit to the study of history and the social sciences using a topic that is more contemporary and relatable to the students and integrating lessons on the analytic frameworks we will be using in the course with the basic reading, writing and interpretive skills needed for social studies.