Notes On The Wire
I think because I just cringed my way through this entire twitter feed, and also maybe because in the back of my head somewhere I know that people are starting a new semester, I’ve been thinking about how Anthropology and Sociology Departments are increasingly holding up The Wire as a valuable text in building an understanding of America’s collapsing inner city.
And, of course, I am as guilty of this as everyone else. I love the show, of course, and in my senior year of college I spent Tuesday nights in an empty classroom building screening and leading discussions on The Wire’s first season. I volunteered to do this because Skidmore’s urban anthropology program is disgustingly feeble and because I thought that The Wire would help to introduce the roots of the social conditions in America’s inner city and, I guess, foster an understanding of America’s urban poor with a bit more accuracy than you typically get, say, on MTV or whatever. Of course, that isn’t exactly how it works.
The mistake I made—and the mistake that most professors using The Wire as any sort of sociological text are also probably making—was assuming that watching a fictional television show will help people develop a more empathetic understanding of actual humans or actual conditions. I genuinely believe that watching—or reading or listening to—fiction will make you a better person, but it is naive to think that texts can do that at any meaningful scale in isolation.
Where The Wire if helpful is as an example. It is something to point to and say, “see deindustrialization, housing and development, crime and prison, and the education system are all hopelessly intertwined,” but it isn’t something we should delude ourselves into thinking helps us actually understand life in West Baltimore.
Also, where are all the women?
