What makes "The Wire" Different

The HBO series The Wire deviates from the type of television aired and produced that Pepi Leistyna describes in "Social Class and Entertainment Television" that is repetitive in fear of poor ratings. Leistyna writes about how blacks are mostly shown in television to have accomplished the "American Dream," with a nice house and stable family, and are never shown to parallel their statistics. The Wire at first glance is like any other police drama that we see on television based in Baltimore, but what is different about it is that it's focus is not on the situations that the police are presented with, but rather with the neglected black underclass in our society. The Wire has a majority black cast, yet does not portray them as living the American dream by any means, and in fact depicts their rejection of the American dream. It identifies the decline in the urban working class market and the misfortunes that come with it. The Wire destroys the ideology that individuals are responsible for their socioeconomic status in our society, and shows how the system is largely responsible for the decisions made by them. Things such as joblessness, lack of quality education, deindustrialization, incarceration and gang violence are shown to all intertwine in certain urban settings such as the ones depicted in the show. Although The Wire receives criticism for only depicting urban black ghettos, it accurately depicts "the struggle" of people within these ghettos. The struggle is depicted widely in our media, often times not accurately, but the reason why the struggle exists is almost never portrayed or taught, barely even in school. Junior year of high school I signed up for the only humanities class offered in the school in place of an English course. In the class we were taught why de facto segregation still exists in our society due to laws in our past that have a long lasting legacy. Legislation passed in our history, such as the GI Bill which provided low interest housing for mostly only white veterans, are partially responsible for statistics that prove white privilege still exists. One statistic is that the average black family in America is worth one eighth the net assets of the average white family. To my disappointment, this Humanities class was the only class that taught about why a wealth gap exists in our countries between whites and minorities; the African American Studies course covered slavery, African American culture and the civil rights movement but did not cover things like redlining and FDR's New Deal laws that favored whites and how they effect our society today. The lack of education surrounding the wealth gap in our country (or at least my high school) is responsibly for the ideology that people who can't get ahead have nobody/nothing to blame but themselves.


Sources:

pbs.org
slate.com