I love the TV show Abbott Elementary. I love how deeply the show nudges its audience toward empathy as characters' backstories are revealed. Across the seasons, the core teaching staff has shared stories of their own families with one another as they grow closer as "work family". In episode after episode, the teachers and their family members are afforded grace as they reveal broken relationships with their own families. In multiple plot lines, the staff learns to grow beyond behaviors and needs rooted in childhoods within challenging [middle-class] families.
And their colleagues nod with understanding and support and welcome the colleagues' family members with grace when they appear in episodes.
[Spoiler alert. Click away if you don't want to read about plot and characters.]
The exception to these gestures of grace, empathy and acceptance comes when Janine's mother Vanetta comes to school. As context for how this low-income Black woman is written into her episode, let's look first at how other teachers' [seemingly middle-class] families have been portrayed by screenwriters:
Abbott Teachers' Family Misfits
Over the seasons we meet the core teachers' family members and hear stories of their childhoods. As is often the case in sitcoms, behaviors that would be understood as character-defining middle-class emotional abuse in a drama series are instead treated as poignant but endearing quirks in heartwarming, empathy-driven comedy.
Jacob revealed in Season 2 that his childhood winter holidays were marred by his parents' anger and conflict. He no longer visits family over long holiday breaks. Jacob acts out that loneliness and damage by crashing and ruining Melissa and Barbara and Mr. Johnson’s beloved tradition of a private holiday dinner. He lacks any self-awareness of what he's doing until reprimanded by Mr. Johnson. Jacob's cluelessness is written to invite empathy as we learn how indifferent his family was to his childhood pain.
In Season 4, Jacob dreads an upcoming visit from his brother in part because of their parents' dysfunction in raising them. When his brother shows up at school unexpectedly, we witness Jacob learning and growing as his brother is empathetically portrayed as more nuanced than Jacob had known him to be. The staff knows of the serious conflicts within Jacob's family but unconditionally embraces the brother. We are invited to consider that Jacob's interpretation of family is flawed, and that family members also deserve the benefit of a doubt
Melissa frequently jokes about criminal activity within her white "South Philly" family and about her own semi-violent acts and threats. It’s a running joke that many of the things things that she needs for her classroom have illicitly acquired – by her or family members. When other teachers need things, she offers help from relatives with access to stolen goods. Her casual stories of family crime are treated by the scriptwriters with humor. She is warmly accepted by the rest of the staff and honored as a mentor by the younger teachers.
Melissa is in long-term dysfunctional conflict with a sister that started over a family recipe. At school and in Melissa's home, the sisters shout at one another and insult each other. In one scene, Melissa looks through family photographs and gets emotional as one that reminds her of "how close we were". She turns the camera around to show a photo of the sisters throwing punches on one's wedding day. In another episode, she turns a family holiday dinner into a fierce holiday competition that she must win at all costs. She wants to defeat, not honor her family by cooking for them.
The other teachers accept all the conflict and crime within Melissa's family as quirky. They make no judgements, even inferring that her white family is quintessentially "Philly".
Gregory is dating Barbara's daughter in the early seasons. When the daughter visits the school, we learn that Barbara is in long-term conflict with her adult daughter over Barbara's disapproval of the daughter's career choices and values. The daughter finds her relationship Barbara so painful that she limits contact with her. Gregory himself laments the daughters' materialism and her frustration with how little Gregory makes as a teacher. No judgement is conveyed of Barbara's painful judgement of her own daughter, or of the daughter's materialism. The scripts are written to convey empathy for each.
(We learn another lesson about Barbara's propensity to judge in another early episode when Barbara learns, with Janine's help, to fully see a Black mother of a student instead of judging the mothers' assumed morals. Based on appearance, Barbara had stereotyped the Black mother as a neglectful single mother, though the child was thriving. Though she's still stereotyping parents after decades of teaching Black children, Barbara is written with grace as she develops insight into her flaws.)
We also learn, with humor, that as a child, Gregory was punished for normal childhood exuberance, an experience that leaves him ill-equipped to manage his young Black students' classroom behavior as a new teacher. His eventual realization that his fathers' child rearing was abnormal is written with humor.
We meet Gregory's strict father and learn that he owns a landscaping business that he simply assumes Gregory take over, pressuring Gregory to leave his teaching job because he, the father, has different plans for his adult son. In one phone call, Gregory's father requires his son to address him by his military title instead of the "what's up, pop?" endearment that Gregory used when answering the phone. Other teachers witness this without comment. Gregory navigates all of this in part by leveraging skills his father taught him to quietly care for a school garden and to eventually start a gardening club for the children. Gregory's relationship with a father who was extremely controlling is written with grace and nuance, the damage to Greg downplayed as he brings valuable things he learned from his father to the students.
Ava is too self-absorbed in early seasons to be in loving relationships with anyone. She constantly abuses her role: She sexually harasses male staff. She spending hours in her office working on her own social media accounts instead of doing her job. She casually misuses district funds. Her level of self-absorption is so severe that she can’t see the damage she causes to her staff and therefore the children in the school. And she's written as a funny character who is eventually appreciated by the staff. She deserves empathy in spite of her many flaws.
Ava also crashes a private event of some of her peers, indifferent to how her neediness is ruining their plans. Later, we are invited to understand Ava's backstory: She was abandoned by her father as a child who moved on to "a new family". We learn that her father actually lives and runs a small business nearby, when he comes to the school after sponsoring an event, he is treated with respect and humor. No one judges him for abandoning his daughter.
The screen writing in all of these episodes assumes nuance when we learn how families had mistreated these teachers (and how Barbara is estranged from her own daughter). The gift that characters offer one another is the expectation that everyone deserves empathy (even when being annoying) from their peers rather than the judgement. In spite of being often insensitive to one another and sometimes to their students (storylines attribute some of this to their own childhoods), the staff care for one another and also extends that care to families of the teachers. The main writer of many of the episodes spoke in an interview (more on that below) of the importance of "unpacking other people" and knowing "why things shake out the way they do".
The gift of Abbott is that we're invited to offer the teachers (and some students) unconditional admiration and empathy, in spite of their revealed flaws.
Except for Janine's mother.
The Limits of Empathy
From the beginning of the show, we learn that Janine is different from her teaching peers in that she was the first in her family to go to college and often doesn't have the money for social gatherings or other extras. We are invited to admire Janine for graduating from Penn and pursing a profession.
Her quirks are annoying but not toxic. She tries hard to solve every problem, pesters her peers for guidance on doing better work with some children, earnestly explores big ideas that she learned in college. She thinks the best of even a lame boyfriend. Her deep investment in her teaching is eventually acknowledged and rewarded with a temporary position in the central district office, developing innovations for other schools.
Where does family fit into any of this?
We meet Janine's sister in the second season when the sister returns from Denver (where she had "run") to visit. We learn little about the life that the sister now lives or how she supports herself. The sister is condescending to Janine about her apartment and brushes off the activities she Janine has eagerly planned for the two of them. In spite of tension between them, they each roll their eyes when mentioning their mother, and then eventually fight over staying/leaving home and their different relationships with their mother, though we learn little about their mother as they fight. When she visits the school, the sister is vaguely snide about Janine's classroom having "Janine all over it". They eventually offer each other kindness and acceptance of each others' lives, inviting empathy for their relationship. Ava brings the sister to Janine's classroom after school and makes joke about Janine's relative shortness, but no other staff speak with the sister as they have with the family members of other teachers.
Three episodes later, Janine's mother, Vanetta, unexpectedly shows up at the school. Janine immediately tenses hearing familiar footsteps approaching in the hall. Vanetta barges into the classroom, her character written as an over-the-top woman in tight clothing, big hair, and high heels. She speaks with an exaggerated southern/urban accent, while Janine speaks impeccable standard English. Vanetta struts around the classroom talking to children and to Janine, sometimes admiring and sometimes denigrating Janine's work. We learn that she's never visited the school before though Janine has invited her.
Janine has just told her colleagues that she's planning a short vacation in Maryland over the Memorial Day weekend, and has saved enough for the small splurge of a massage. After the children leave, Venetta casually mentions a "new job" to Janine and then tells Janine she owes her cell phone company $639.17 and that her phone has been cut off.
Barbara and Ava meet Vanetta in the hall, introduced by a clearly uncomfortable Janine. Barbara frowns and critically looks Vanetta up and down and says insincerely that she's heard so much about her. Ava looks at Vanetta with alarm and leaves.
Barbara later walks into the teachers' room where Vanetta is searching through through a supply cupboard. Barbara talks about how much Janine has accomplished and accuses Vanetta of showing up only to get money from her daughter. Barbara then offers to pay the phone bill herself to "leave Janine out of it" so that Janine can still have her vacation. Vanetta is insulted and says that this is a "family matter" and insists that she didn't just come for the money. She tells Barbara – accurately – that "you don't know me".
Melissa later tells Barbara that she could "smell the swindle" on Janine's mother right away and describes in detail what a swindle smells like (for the Melissa character, being so familiar with swindlers is funny). Ava tells others that she remembers that she and Vanetta once danced on the same table in a club (funny for Ava the professional, but another negative about Vanetta). Though they speak of being wary of overstepping, Barbara and Melissa perform their sense that Janine needs to be protected from her mother.
Janine speaks several times of loving her mother, but we are not invited to feel empathy for Vanetta as a low-income Black woman. Throughout, Vanetta is judged and played for laughs. There's nothing about "unpacking other people" in the script when it comes to Vanetta. There's no suggestion that Vanetta might be very conscious that she's being judged by her daughters' colleagues, or that it might be painful for her to need money.
She's instead written in a single dimension, and that can only work if playing to common stereotypes: We learn nothing about why she doesn't have the money to pay the phone bill. We don't know if Vanetta works in a low-pay job, has medical debt with punishing interest, or was left with a partner's bills. We are simply invited to fill in the blanks that she is an irresponsible poor Black woman. We are invited to see Vanetta through Barbara's judgmental eyes, though in two other plot lines, the lesson is that Barbara's can be judgmental and wrong about other Black women.
Janine eventually calmly and competently tells her mother that she will call the phone company to work out a payment plan and will make the first two payments with the money she'd saved for her massage on vacation.
At the end of the day, Barbara asks Janine how she is. After hearing so many stories of her colleagues' flawed parents and witnessing Barbara's own flawed parenting, Janine says something that no other character has said about their family:
Janine says that that she was so "embarrassed" by Vanetta.
Barbara then takes her shopping for her upcoming trip, performing maternal by providing material support that Vanetta cannot.
The only character who isn't often written as acting out the traces of childhood pain on students or colleagues is Janine. But we're invited to pity only her, out of all the flawed characters who are never, ever pitied for the crime, anger, judgment, emotional abuse, or abandonment they experienced as children.
Poverty as a Character Flaw
Though they teach in a low-income school and fight for the students who attend, none of the teachers mentions any understanding of why a Black single mother might have struggled with money or anything about Janine's father. There's no acknowledgment of any part that Vanetta, in spite of her flaws, might have played in Janine's accomplishments. There's no shared understanding among Black women staff of the odds stacked against them in places like Philly.
Venetta is a flawed individual, stripped of any broader context and therefore empathy.
Yet Janine's own financial stress – the pivotal issue in this episode – are also beyond comment: There's no mention of why an Ivy League college graduate who overcame the odds to work as a teacher has had to carefully save up for a very modest vacation and then sacrifice a planned small luxury to help her parent with a relatively small bill. Low pay is just taken as a given, or even noble.
Who Tells the Story of Low-Income First-Generation Students and Families?
I dug deeper into this episode when it first aired when members of a first-generation student advocacy group circulated a study guide for the episode on their group Facebook page, recommending that the episode be used to teach first-generation students about "boundary setting" with parents and about finding "champions" when parents cannot support them in academic and professional goals. The study guide spoke of the importance of "media representation" of first-generation college students but said nothing of who wrote the Vanetta episode (and therefore who was "representing" her).
To be clear, boundary setting and finding champions are excellent skills to learn, and as they reveal their own backgrounds, many of the teachers speak of learning to set boundaries with their own middle-class parents and to see their colleagues as their champions when parents are not.
This is the exact storyline for most of the middle-class teachers in Abbott Elementary.
Yet Janine has yet another unarticulated challenge: Learning how to understand her own mother on her own terms, apart from the critical judgment of more privileged peers. Her challenges extend to how peers will understand her when they stereotype others in her family. But this challenge is not written into the Mom episode. Janine is not given the grace to realize that she developed both strengths and weaknesses from how she was raised, even while she's among the least damaged characters on the show.
Unlike the other characters, Janine is offered no chance to better understand "why things shake out as they do" about her mothers' circumstances or her own.
It's simply given: her mother is poor because poverty is a character flaw and Janine is offered grace as she distances herself from her mother by agreeing with colleagues that her mother is embarrassing.
Whose Eyes Show us How To See Vanetta?
Thus, I wondered who had written Vanetta as one of the very few characters in the series undeserving of empathy. At the time of that discussion in the First Gen advocates' group, I could find little about the screen writer of the episode other than that she'd attended USC.
I looked again this week as I was watching Season 4 of Abbott and now found that the screenwriter, Ava Coleman (really!) also graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC, the private school where the children of multiple presidents and cabinet members have sent their children. The screenwriter speaks in an interview (when she returned to Sidwell to speak to current students) of her mother being at the "groundbreaking edge" of Black media (she was among the founders of the Black Entertainment Network and has served on the boards of multiple big media companies) and her father being a successful lawyer.
She is a lovely, very talented, and hard-working young woman. She talks in the interview about her intentional effort to nurture empathy for all the characters, yet when she speaks of this episode, she speaks of her intent to show the growing love between Barbara and Janine, in spite of each knowing each others' flaws. She does not mention Vanetta, a central character in the episode and of course, in Janine's life.
The screen writers, themselves from privileged backgrounds, could not imagine an episode in which a low-income first-generation college student would come to understand and empathize with her parent's backstory and invite the audience to learn more about the nuances of Black women, the pressures of respectability, and poverty that renders one unworthy of respect.
In an otherwise wonderful show that invites the audience to look more deeply at the lives of staff and students, that's a serious disappointment.
