Why Do People Keep Asking Quinta Brunson to Make a School Shooting Episode of Abbott Elementary?

Quinta Brunson is once again defending her decision not to broach the ever-important reality of school shootings in her hit ABC series, Abbott Elementary.

Speaking in a new interview for Glamour Magazine’s Woman of the Year cover issue, Brunson explained that her reasoning stems from her perspective that there’s two realities of the classroom: one where teachers are just trying to make it through the specific day-to-day challenges and one where the general public views the broader challenges (like school shootings) that affect the educational system at-large through the news.

While she acknowledged that school shootings happen “all the time,” Brunson said:

“To us, these school shootings are the biggest thing happening, but when I talk to my friends who are teachers, yes, that’s huge, but today they’re just trying to get through this lesson. They’re just trying to get the reading scores up. They’re just trying to do this job. If anything, the school shooting thing is in the background, like, ‘Fuck.’ It’s kind of like, ‘We got to deal with that too?’

“I don’t want to open up my show to that political violence,” she further shared. “I consider it that at this point—even the discourse of it is violent. And although I participate in it outside of my show, and I’m a huge advocate for eradicating gun violence in this country … I don’t think my show has to carry that.”

Additionally, speaking to why Abbott doesn’t take such an explicit “race-first” approach and focus in their storylines despite it being a Black leading and Black-centric show, Brunson explained:

With Abbott, I really wanted to lead with everyday story first, and let everything fold into that. So I wanted to talk about, instead of ‘Janine confronts her Blackness,’ or ‘Janine deals with this race issue,’ it’s really just like, ‘Janine is trying to change a light bulb.’

I think that’s the way the majority of the people that I [know are]. Like my family, they’re very working class. When they’re at work, the issue at work is just the task at hand. And when you’re working in a predominantly Black environment, the issues just don’t come up as much. So for me, with Abbott, it’s like, well, this is a predominantly Black environment. These are characters that aren’t going to spend their days talking about race. And as you can see on the show, it’s not like race never comes up. It does.

I don’t know about you, but I’m glad Quinta is sticking to her convictions on not having the school shooting episode. Yes, we all know those are an unfortunate reality in the U.S. but the show is a workplace COMEDY, taking place in a predominately Black, low-income area school.

We already don’t get to see that sort of positive representation on television, regular working-class Black folks and children just existing and living normal lives with not as heavy trauma, as it is. What message would it send, what would the optics look like to have a school shooting episode—something with such weight and gravity—take place in that setting? Why bring so much trauma to a show that’s been consistently lauded as a breath of fresh air, positive, and a distraction from the real-life issues as it is? One of the reasons Abbott works and continues to break the mold (and rack up awards) is because of its freshness and much needed levity—and audiences love it for that. Let’s not go switching up on it now.