Q: Where are the intact black families in Baltimore? In The Wire, it seems like all the black adults were
born drug addicts. [Roland Laird]A: Bunny Colvin is married, his children in college or older. Miss Anna, though a foster mother, is a proper role model for Randy. Sydnor is married, though we have not spent time in the marriage, his wedding band has been alluded to. Grace Sampson is married and a young mother.
Viable black families exist. But let me flip it on you: Where are The Wire's intact white families?
Not until recently, Jimmy McNulty. He was separated, drunk and philandering.
Not Rawls. He's apparently a closeted homosexual.
Not Carcetti. He's married, but with a wandering eye.
Not Frank Sobotka. His wife -- what we heard about her -- was pilled up and his son was a lost, neglected cause in many ways.
You want a married, normative white male you gotta go to Prez, I suppose.
Okay, so this is a ridiculous academic exercise -- counting marriages amid a sea of flawed characters, both black and white. The more substantive truth is that we are not portraying all of Baltimore. We are portraying a portion of the city where the institutional conflicts, extreme poverty, a corrupted drug prohibition and dysfunctional class constructs are taking their greatest toll, where the drug economy has devoured neighborhoods with the least resources. We are not in the relative handful of viable city schools in neighborhoods with involved parents and stable families. We are certainly not in Baltimore County, where ordinary lives of well-raised children -- both black and white -- are not being squandered by family dysfunction and institutional neglect.
If you want to suggest that we are hyping the extent of the problems in our depiction of West Baltimore, I will leave you with one singular statistic. Exactly seven percent of the seniors at Southwestern High School -- the normal, zoned high school for the area of West Baltimore we are depicting -- were able to pass the statewide tests. Seven percent.
If anything, we have been generous in our depiction of the state of childhood in some of these neighborhoods, which since the cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s have been simply devoured by the drug trade. In truth, when Ed Burns and I reported The Corner in 1992-1994, our canvass of the six square blocks of Fayette Street betwee Monroe and Mount indicated that at least 60 percent of the adults were drug involved. The depiction of the homes in which these children live is not a matter of Hollywood hype; most of the kids we met on Fayette Street were marginalized from their earliest moments.
I understand that you may perceive a racial message in the fact that the lives so depicted are African-American. Race is a touchy subject and for that reason, many people struggle with the world we are depicting on The Wire. But I can only assure you that the message of The Wire has precious little to do with race. It is about class, and capitalism, and how money and power route themselves. It is about who has a future in America and who is denied a future. This is a show, in fact, about the other America -- as distant from the viable black middle class as from the white middle class. It is a show about people whose lives are worth less every day, because we as a nation have constructed an economic model that assures certain classes luxury and profit while failing to address the basic dignity and relevance of many other Americans trapped at the lowest rungs of that economic model.
In Baltimore, a city that is sixty-five percent black, the people so trapped are largely African-American. And we are from Baltimore. And we are writing what we know. This may discomforting to you, but that is not our intent. I can only stress again that The Wire is not a show about the black experience in America. It is not a show that seeks to chronicle the breadth of African-American history, of African-American accomplishments, or to depict the growing economic, social and political viability of the black middle class or, for that matter, the rising incidence of black affluence. No single drama could encompass the range of African-American experience without becoming stilted, didactic, undramatic and meaningless. This is not to say that other storytelling cannot go to other, more comforting aspects of black experience; other storytelling has, in fact, done so at points, though certainly, more stories about the entire range of black life in America would be welcome on television and elsewhere.
But no story can be intelligently judged by what it is not. It can only be regarded as the story that it is. This is a show about the people left behind in America and about the institutions that have conspired to seal their fate. It is the only continuing drama, I believe, that has devoted itself to the humanity, wit, emotions and experience of those so fated. Are you suggesting that even one show about the other America is too much? That these voices are already too loud? I hope not.
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