Why don’t Black girls commit school shootings?: Exploring the role of race in ‘The Drama’
‘The Drama’ has left audiences polarised on who, if one exists, is the villain. For some, it’s Rachel, who was up in arms (if you’ll pardon the pun) when Emma revealed her secret, but was more than willing to leave a possibly disabled child locked in a cupboard to avoid taking responsibility for her own actions. For others, it’s Charlie, whose story about cyberbullying a child into moving houses seemed to be lacking the full truth. I’m not here to debate who’s worse, but to be clear, it’s Rachel.
Despite the character of Emma being played by Zendaya, who could be considered Black, biracial or mixed race depending on where you’re from, my question during the movie was – why don’t more Black girls commit school shootings?
It’s not that I’m trying to encourage them to solve their problem the way Zendaya’s character Emma tried to. Rather, I’m curious because when we hear about what drove the white boy to do the shooting (well, there’s a 97% chance he’s a boy and a 55-70% chance he’s white), it’s followed by how they were suffering with their mental health. The media churns out stories about how he was ostracised by his schoolmates and had a difficult home life. Yet, if these are all contributing factors that push people to extreme acts like this, then surely Black girls should statistically be more likely to become school shooters?
When it comes to bullying within schools, Black girls are more likely to experience bullying than their white counterparts, despite being less likely to report it or for it to be recorded by teachers. This bullying comes not only from their peers but from their teachers. Studies show that Black girls receive harsher punishments for lesser offences than their white peers. This is far from exclusive to the USA. For example, in Australia, 40% of children from non-European backgrounds reported experiencing racial discrimination in school.
One of the reasons that bullying is underreported for Black students is that racism is often not seen as bullying. Instead, it is portrayed as a one-off incident largely because anti-Black racism is seen as a rite of passage for non-Black children and teenagers. We see it in the reaction to celebrities and public figures being exposed for saying or doing racist things in their youth. From Zohran Mamdani's wife, Rama Duwaji, saying the n word, to Justin Bieber saying the n word, to Paris Hilton saying the n word, the reaction from non-Black people is ‘oh, they were just kids’. Yet, if people claim that it is necessary and natural to go through a racist phase, then it follows that it is natural for Black girls to experience racial bullying and exclusion for the character development of their non-Black peers. This extends to Black boys too whereby they project their internalised self hatred onto Black girls, a phase that extends well into adulthood. Mike escapes a lot of criticism by people who watched the film but it’s largely because he continuously hid behind his white wife's actions thereby escaping responsibility for his own.
The point is that Black girls will experience the same marginalisation that the media reports white male shooters as experiencing. This will then be compounded by racial bullying and misogynoir, and yet, like Emma, they never actually press the trigger.
I’m not trying to justify her potential actions, instead I want to attempt to do what her supposed best friend, Rachel and her fiancé, Charlie, seemed incapable of - understand what drove her to that decision.
In the movie, we see that Emma is raised by her white mother and her Black military father. She doesn’t appear to have any close Black friends; in fact, her closest friend, Rachel, has only been her friend for two years and is part of her future husband's network, rather than a friend Emma made herself. A fact with which Rachel later uses to mock Emma. Her supposed ‘best friend’ Rachel is naturally outraged about what Emma planned to do, a feeling that is seemingly intensified by the fact that her cousin was a victim of gun crime. A cousin who when asked if she’s close to Rachel says ‘well...we’re family’. But that’s not the full story. Rachel’s internalised racism is shown to us when she assumes her husband grew up around guns due to crime, rather than the fact that his uncle is a police officer. Firstly, the fact that she never asked why and just naturally assumed the worst tells us a lot. Secondly, she blames Emma for taking her off the work project, despite the fact Rachel had been unprofessional and hadn't been answering her calls. Rachel's first instinct is to victimise herself and paint Emma as the aggressor.
Further, Rachel takes a perverse pleasure in finding out that Emma, with the good job, gorgeous apartment, and ostensibly lovely fiancé, isn’t perfect. For example, when Emma reveals she’s never been in love, Rachel’s male-centrered self takes this to mean there’s something wrong with Emma. She’s clutching at straws because at the beginning of the movie it’s established that Emma is a kind and likeable person. Rachel is competing with the version of Emma that she has created in her head, meanwhile Emma isn’t aware they’re in a competition, even going as far as to helping Rachel secure work opportunities.
We can all attest to having met white women like Rachel. Sisterhood isn't a key component of white womanhood which reflects in their individualistic and self-serving brand of feminism. Which is why one in two of them voted for Donald Trump in 2024 compared to one in ten Black women.
Rachels will purposefully surround themselves with people from marginalised backgrounds. Often, they’ll even have mixed raced kids. It nurtures the white saviour complex within them because they self-appoint themselves as ‘one of the good ones’. I have no doubt that she regularly brings up her Black husband, biracial best friend and disabled cousin into conversations where it’s not even relevant. These women get a kick out of knowing that their days are easier than the days of their peers. So, when girls like Emma come along and disrupt their worldview by not only being their equals but more successful than them, girls like Rachel bide their time and look for flaws. A lot of Black girls can attest to the ‘pet to threat’ experience. Whereby your white peers will like and support you, but only to a certain point. Once you show that you’re doing better than they are in some aspect of life, you morph into the threat.
Rachel never even found out that Emma actually brought the weapon to school. She only knew that Emma had those thoughts and was planning it. If she truly thought Emma was a threat, she would have called the police; she is a white woman after all. Yet, she still attends the wedding and makes a speech in the hopes of ruining it. She needn’t have worried because Charlie does that for her.
Emma, despite being half Black, appears to have grown up ostracised from the Black community; in fact, in the flashbacks to her childhood, we see her occasionally interacting with Black boys, but appears to be one of the only biracial or Black girls in what seems to be a predominantly white school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A city that, despite having a Black population of over 50%, is heavily segregated. In fact, in 2024, the city allowed the majority-white suburb of St George to secede from Baton Rouge and create its own city in a move that has been labelled as ‘white flight’ and ‘neo-segregation’.
With this context in mind, it is arguable that the bullying Emma experienced was rooted in racism. The examples that she gives her fiancé, Charlie, are flippant by design. They’re supposed to make it appear that what Emma experienced was more teasing than bullying. It's likely that she used these examples because she didn’t want to start explaining to her white fiancé, the racism that the bullying was rooted in.
If Charlie doesn’t ‘get it,’ she will at best experience an awkward silence and at worst leave herself vulnerable to him dismissing the racism. Emma also has a white mother, meaning that she experienced the same microaggressive bullying at home that she also dealt with at school. Her mother also could have told her just to ‘rise above’ it, which is often parrotted to Black girls and essentially just means suppress your feelings for white comfort. And yes, I’m judging Michelle for the ‘if the go low we go high’ comment that set Black girls back about 50 years.
But what happens when the slate can’t be wiped clean? Emma is in desperate need of therapy. She never truly got over what happened as a teenager because she never fully acknowledged what led her there; she just decided she could ‘start over’. Years later, as an adult, she is still struggling to find the words to explain what she did.
When Charlie said there are probably thousands of people walking around with the same thoughts as Emma, he was right. A broken clock is right twice a day. There are likely many Black girls like Emma who would like to take revenge on the institutions that failed them, but unlike their white and male peers, they rarely, if ever, reach for the gun.
Perhaps it is this fact that results in gun control laws in the States being debated rather than enacted. Often, the faces of school shootings are white boys whose actions are continuously individualised and seen as a natural result of their hardships by the media. Yet, if girls who looked like Emma or were darker acted on the same impulses their white peers did, would guns be banned purely to protect racist white kids?
Emma decides not to go through with the shooting simply because another one happens on the same day. She seems to see the shock and emotion of her schoolmates, including the death of one of them and realise what she was planning to do was something she and the affected would never be able to come back from. Not just those who would have potentially died, but their loved ones and those who knew of them. Emma is finally able to see the world beyond her own pain and suffering, and as a result, is the empathetic, to a fault, person we know by the end of the film.
As for Black girls around the USA who similarly don’t go for the trigger, we’ll never really know why. Is it the emphasis on community over the individual that many Black children globally are raised with? Is it that they’re taught to accept bullying as the norm? What do you think it is?
