MEDIA AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

THE WIRE (2002-2008)

“The closest that moving pictures have come so far to the depth and nuance of the novel”

(Kulish, New York Times 2006).

OCR KEY QUESTIONS How do the contemporary media represent regions/ethnic/social/collective

groups of people in different ways? How does contemporary representation compare to previous time

periods?

1

What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?

To what extent is human identity increasingly ‘mediated’?

Seasons: June 2, 2002, and ended on March 9, 2008, comprising 60 episodes over five seasons.Production Co: Blown Deadline Productions, Home Box Office (HBO)Runtime:  59 min

Cast

Series cast summary:

Dominic West ...

 Det. James 'Jimmy' McNulty / ... (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

John Doman ...

 Dep. Comm. for Operations William A. Rawls / ... (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Deirdre Lovejoy ...

 Asst. State's Atty. Rhonda Pearlman (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Wendell Pierce ...

 Det. William 'Bunk' Moreland (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Lance Reddick ...  Lt. Cedric Daniels / ... (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Sonja Sohn ...

 Det. Shakima 'Kima' Greggs (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Seth Gilliam ...  Sgt. Ellis Carver / ... (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Domenick Lombardozzi

..

. Det. Thomas 'Herc' Hauk / ... (60 episodes, 2002-2008)

Clarke Peters ...  Det. Lester Freamon (59 episodes, 2002-2008)

2

Andre Royo ...

 Reginald 'Bubbles' Cousins (52 episodes, 2002-2008)

Michael Kenneth Williams

..

.  Omar Little (51 episodes, 2002-2008)

Jim True-Frost ...

 Det. Roland 'Prez' Pryzbylewski / ... (50 episodes, 2002-2008)

Frankie Faison ...

 Acting Commissioner Ervin H. Burrell / ... (47 episodes, 2002-2008)

Corey Parker Robinson

..

.  Det. Leander Sydnor (45 episodes, 2002-2008)

Delaney Williams ...  Sgt. Jay Landsman (45 episodes, 2002-2008)

J.D. Williams ...

 Preston 'Bodie' Broadus (42 episodes, 2002-2006)

Wood Harris ...  Avon Barksdale (39 episodes, 2002-2008)

Idris Elba ...  Russell 'Stringer' Bell (37 episodes, 2002-2004)

Aidan Gillen ...

 Councilman Thomas 'Tommy' Carcetti / ... (35 episodes, 2004-2008)

Jamie Hector ...  Marlo Stanfield (32 episodes, 2004-2008)

Gbenga Akinnagbe

..

.  Chris Partlow / ... (30 episodes, 2002-2008)

3

THE CHARACTERS

The Wire has a clear division between its characters – the law and the street. That said it attempts to present a view of all the central protagonists which avoids lazy generalisations and stereotypes. This is a narrative with an ensemble cast who drift in and out of storylines. The police are portrayed in a variety of ways. For the most part they are certainly not seen as heroes. They drink heavily, they attack and beat up suspects in custody and they are driven, not by a moral duty to protect the public, but by an obsessive need to beat the gangs. What is apparent on The Wire is the pressure on the police officers to meet targets, clean-up rates and the constant question of promotion. The internal battles between senior officers and their subordinates are also central.The primary focus is on the police officers carrying out the surveillance detail. They are led by Lt Cedric Daniels an ambitious, but honest officer. The main police officer is Jimmy McNulty, a hard-drinking, recently divorced, Irish-American cop. Some of his behaviour in the show suggests a man out of control and with obsessional tendencies. For example in one episode he uses his young sons to tail a suspect, but it says a great deal about The Wire that he is very much the moral fulcrum of the show. It is McNulty that wants to pursue matters when the hierarchy has dismissed these as unimportant. There are a number of police officers with speaking parts and all of them are shown both on the job and in coping with the pressures of their domestic lives.

The street is also represented by characters that turn previous representations of gang members on their head. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell run the main crew and perhaps it is Stringer Bell who is the most fascinating character here. He sees the drugs business as a route to other more legitimate ways of making money, such as real estate development. He attends classes on economic theory and tries to incorporate these practices into selling heroin and crack cocaine. Perhaps it is he who represents the American dream in its purest form.

Another key character from the street is the excellent Omar Little. He robs the drugs dealers, carries a shotgun and is answerable to nobody, unlike the police or the gang members. He is also openly homosexual, which raises really interesting questions about the representations of Afro-American males.

Unlike many other American shows The Wire has a predominately black cast, reflecting Baltimore’s demographic. This in itself marks a key difference from a number of other generic texts.

4

THE SETTING: BALTIMORETaken from: http://www.nathanielturner.com/robertmooreand1199union3.htm

In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, home to 950,000 people and a thriving manufacturing and shipping industry. As the economic base of Maryland, Baltimore provided 75% of all jobs to workers in the region. Many were manufacturing jobs in textiles and automobile production.  The region’s economic powerhouse, however, was the steel industry.

Baltimore lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1995, 75% of its industrial employment — not to mention most of the jobs with union representation.  Currently, only 6% of all jobs in the City are in manufacturing.  The collapse of industry led to a number of changes in the demographic makeup of the City and the surrounding region, contributing to a crisis in urban poverty that lingers today.African American migration

Beginning in the early 20th Century, African-Americans from the rural South, many with sharecropping backgrounds, began moving north in great numbers.  Baltimore became a major destination for southern blacks fleeing poverty and Jim Crow, seeking jobs and a better place to raise their children.  

White flight

5

Prior to 1900, predominantly African-American neighborhoods did not exist in Baltimore:  black residents were spread out throughout the City, and no single ward was more than one-third black.  Between 1950 and 1970, Baltimore’s African-American population almost doubled, while whites moved away from the City.  As a result, by 1997, Baltimore had gone from less than one-quarter to nearly two-thirds black.

Life was not easy for new residents.  Black Baltimoreans continued to face discrimination, and were affected by poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing deterioration to a disproportionate degree compared to white residents.  While the poverty rate for whites in the City was about 10% in 1960, it was roughly three times higher for blacks.  Baltimore’s crime rate went up steadily through the 1960s, and by 1970, the City had one of the highest homicide rates in the country.  

For many longtime residents, this decade — punctuated by the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King — was the turning point.  Middle-class whites began moving further and further towards the edges of the City, and increasingly began to look outside the city for an enclave apart from black expansion and social unrest.  While in 1950, almost

6

two-thirds of the region’s white population lived in Baltimore, only 12.5% lived in the City by 1997.

Flight of the Black Middle Class

Exacerbating conditions was the subsequent flight from the City of middle-class African-Americans.  Increasingly, Baltimore’s black middle class followed white Baltimoreans who had fled to the suburbs before them.  Between 1990 and 2000, the number of African-Americans living in the City declined for the first time, while the most recent census report shows a decline in

Baltimore’s black population roughly equal to that of its white population.13  Now, after decades of population drain, the characteristic that defines the City’s polarization from the suburbs is not race, but economic class.

In a city an increasingly poor and minority population, the low-wage service sector has become the principal determinant of the economic status of Baltimore City residents.  The growing concentration of urban poverty and the rise of low-wage service economy have at once reinforced one another and exacerbated poor living conditions for urban workers.

The death of Freddie Greyn April 12, 2015, Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr., a 25-year-old Black American man, was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department for possessing what the police alleged was an illegal switchblade under Baltimore law. While being transported in a police van, Gray fell into a coma and was taken to a trauma center.

Police timeline of the arrest Sunday, 12 April, 0839: Officers approach Gray and he flees on foot 0840: Gray arrested on corner of Presbury Street, Sandtown

7

0842: Police request a van 0854: Van departs with Gray inside, conscious and speaking 0854-0924: Van makes a total of four stops between arrest and police

station arrival 0924: Police request paramedics to take Gray to hospital

Demonstrators took to the streets to protest against excessive use of force. In early days, most of the protests were calm. Many carried banners, some of which read "Black lives matter" - an echo of similar protests around the country in recent months. But a week after Gray died, and with police releasing

little new information about the circumstances of his death, the demonstrations took a violent turn. On 27 April, a funeral service for Gray was held. That afternoon and evening rioters tore through parts of Baltimore leaving a path of debris, burnt or smashed cars, and looted storefronts. The National Guard was dispatched in an attempt to restore control and the mayor ordered a curfew between the hours of 2200 and 0500. On 1 May the state prosecutor announced criminal charges against six police officers involved in the case.

DAVID SIMON (creator, head writer)

Upon leaving college, Simon worked as a police reporter at The Baltimore Sun from 1982 to 1995After years of reporting in Baltimore’s ghettos, he found himself at ease with being the only white person in a room, or the only person in the room who didn’t know how to re-vial drugs, and found, too, that he could channel the voices of people in the game. “To be a decent city reporter, I had to listen to people who were different from me,” Simon explained. “I had to not be uncomfortable asking stupid questions or being on the outside. I found I had a knack for walking into situations where I didn’t know anything, and just waiting. A lot of reporters don’t want to be the butt of jokes. But sometimes it’s useful to act as if you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”He rose to national prominence with his 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The product of 12 months immersed in the Baltimore homicide unit, it was quickly acclaimed as a classic of contemporary journalism and soon inspired a TV series, NBC's Homicide: Life on the

8

Street (1993-1999). Simon's next book, The Corner (1997), was written with retired detective Edward Burns; it was the product of another year-long immersion, this time in a West Baltimore neighborhood ravaged by the drug trade and the drug war. It too made a mark on the small screen, as an HBO miniseries in 2000.Simon had a hand in each program -- he co-wrote The Corner and wrote several episodes of Homicide -- but he didn't exercise creative control over a television series until he and Burns launched The Wire in 2002. Though with The Wire, even the phrase television series is somewhat misleading. Each season is more like a 13-hour film, or a 13-chapter novel, that grows steadily more engrossing as it unfolds. 

ED BURNS (producer, writer, and co-creator)Burns is a former Baltimore police detective for the Homicide and Narcotics divisions, and a public school teacher. He often draws upon these experiences for his writing. He has worked closely with writing partner David Simon. They have collaborated on The Corner and The Wire. They originally set out to create a police drama loosely based on Burns' experiences working on protracted investigations of violent drug dealers using surveillance technology. He had often faced frustration with the bureaucracy of the police department, which Simon equated with his own ordeals as a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

POSITIVE RESPONSES TO THE WIRE

The Wire contests racial normatives and refuses to manufacture simple solutions to complicated policy issues within the time frame of a single episode or season. Instead, it presented complex individuals struggling with the inherent tensions of good and bad and rejecting simple racial

categorizations.Todd Fraley (2009)

Rather than the ‘easy triumph of justice’, it offers a:

9

‘Mix of urban sociology, and fiercely argued politics…through an examination of the pressures and policies that govern everyone’s lives…

from dispossessing…outcasts to the corporations and institutions indifferent to those cast out by economic realities’.Brian Rose, ‘The Wire‘ in The essential HBO reader

2008) ‘One of the few places in TV willing to argue passionately about the world

outside the boundaries of the small screen.’Brian Rose, ‘The Wire‘ in The essential HBO reader

2008)

With a ‘large and largely African American cast’, The Wire continued in the vein of previous programming that ‘broke a mold of racial uniformity.’

Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, (UC Press: Berkeley, 2000)

 ‘Color is no longer invisible but racial representations are presented in the context of class and culture to create parallels between worlds and

identities commonly presented as dichotomous’.Todd Fraley (2009)

‘Combining complex characters with a serial storyline, The Wire challenged assumptions about who and what we are while

commenting on fundamental social and political issues. Too often complex aspects of individuality are discarded for judgments based on perceptions

tied to race. Because nearly every character played with stereotypes, each episode of The Wire demanded reconsideration of assumptions

about authentic racial identities’.Todd Fraley (2009)

The Wire explored the realities of postindustrial America. It also re-introduces the ‘old American hero…the self-remade man.’ 

Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time,(UC Press: Berkeley, 2000)

Where Cosby failed to comment on economic and social disparities, The Wire considers these issues and offers a prime example of how TV can challenge a hegemonic social and racial order built upon separation by moving beyond constructed dichotomies and revealing the intersection

and interdependence of class, race, and gender. Todd Fraley (2009)

10

The Wire has overcome the limitation of questions concerning authentic, positive, and negative, with a commitment to social realism. When shows

like Julia, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and even The Cosby Show are ‘critiqued for not telling it like it is’ they become a struggle over how to

represent reality. (Bodroghkozy, 2012)

Responding to these criticisms, The Wire offers a blend of the contested meanings of race, and recognizes that racial experience is not

singular. Black is no longer code for a violence, poverty, crime, deviance, and drug abuse. While such representations are present in TV and

reality, The Wire’s appreciation for the influence of social context on identity helps to ‘unhinge black and white from previous definitions that

rely on racial codes.’ (Bodroghkozy, 2012)

The characters and issues found in The Wire apply Hill Street Blues’ use of ‘multilayered realms of law and lawlessness… [that] demonstrate how we

are all subject to similar kinds of institutional pressures and tensions…’ (Rose, 85)

TV should not be seen as a ‘progression from stereotypes to truth but a struggle to constantly articulate the meanings of people’s identities and

the way they live those cultural categories.’ (Grossberg, 233)

Over the course of five seasons, The Wire highlighted the complexities of identity and race, and placed ‘other’ America at center stage to compel privileged/default America to examine the consequences of misguided

and shortsighted ‘codes.’ Throughout, struggles to articulate racial identities marked by nuance and similarity as opposed to difference were presented, and TV once again contained assumptions about who and what

we are, commented on ideological issues, and offered insight to social dilemmas.

(Newcomb and Hirsch)

The Wire, unlike many TV shows, is full of storylines that seek to intervene on public issues, including policing and racism. Its storylines resonate in

11

today’s America – especially policing and racism – even though its last episode aired in 2008. In fact, NPR’s Eric Deggans recently argued

that The Wire is more important now than when it aired, “because so many of its messages about urban failure, policing, and race” are still a

reality.

The show challenges conventional thinking about white racism, sexuality, the prison industrial complex, the failure of the war on drugs, and a host of problems American cities face today. It is an unflinching critique of the

American dream and who gets to live it. It is meant to move privileged audiences toward greater compassion for people whose lives are

forgotten in America. In short, The Wire raises “big questions”

People love the show so much that positive fan hype about it has reached a remarkable number of people. When I mention the class to my friends–on campus or off–I find I need to be prepared to talk about it. Those who have watched the five-season, 60-episode run tend to love it. Not like it, love it. The Wire has a 9.4/10 rating on imdb.com from 154,000 raters;

Simon won a MacArthur “Genius” Award; it was immensely successful and profitable for HBO.

So what is happening when we hype The Wire? How is a show that is so critical of America, so critical of much of its audience, also so beloved?

What does our love for The Wire have to do with the crisis facing us? The answers, unfortunately, are not that flattering.

In the words of communication theorist Kenneth Burke, social talk creates “identification,” a “shared substance” with others based on our outward,

spoken similarities. Identification is the basis for communities. Talking about our media habits, then, is one means of building our “social

capital,” of creating networks, norms, and common ground that can be mobilized toward some sort of change.

Over the years of teaching and talking about the show, I’ve learned that when we talk about The Wire, the conversations often are completely

detached from what The Wire says about systemic racism and the failure of the American dream. Many people who watch it would not endorse its

portrayal of America’s problems. Far from it. This fall, many of my students will say they do not think The Wire teaches us lessons about race

and racism in America. Instead, they either will reject that narrative, or they will interpret the show as a fairly typical, morally benign cop drama. And they aren’t alone in their denial–TV studies scholarship tells us that

programs don’t simply tell us what to think; we build meaning from stories based on experiences.

We continue to live in what Simon calls “two Americas”–one connected to and the other severed from its abundance and promise, and the racial divisions are painfully obvious today. In this sense the killings of Black

folks by police are not “news,” but rather more evidence that Black Americans, to use Lauren Berlant’s term, are dying “slow deaths.”

12

PAUL ACHTER Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Richmond. (2015)

NEGATIVE SOCIOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO THE WIRE

1. Where are the upwardly mobile stories in The Wire?

“I get frustrated watching it because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What

they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people

who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

Elijah Anderson   (Yale University; author of Code of the Streets, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner).

2. Where are the upwardly mobile stories in The Wire?

Katherine Newman; Chutes and Ladders (2006)

Katherine Newman tracked 40 working-poor minorities across 10 years and found that nine had been able to break into the middle class, suggesting that even at the bottom rungs of the economy, upward mobility is still possible.  Some critics of The Wire have argued that these kinds of stories are missing from this narrative, and thus it portrays the urban poor as victims incapable of rejecting the powerful forces that conspire to keep them at the bottom of the social ladder.  Newman also found that one-third of her subjects were either still unemployed or working for minimum wage, and that the decisive factor for the success stories was whether they belonged to families who could support them (or whether they didn’t need to support a family themselves). In other words, personal agency had little to do with it. In the world created by Simon for The Wire there are very few, if any, of these sorts of supportive family networks.  

13

HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS

In the world of TV, discrimination, domination and struggle have been continuously displaced by a menacing Black underclass disproportionately

represented in news accounts where ‘blacks dominate the visual representations that evoke images of crime, drugs, and social problems.’

Herman Gray, ‘Television, Black Americans, and the American Dream,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6, (1989): 376-386.

Minorities remain ’severely underrepresented on TV programming and when they do appear, their level of power and social status is significantly

lower that their white counterparts.’ (Voorhees, 418).

When TV does venture inside the separate and unfamiliar world of black America, viewers are provided the comforting reminders of whiteness and

an ideology of white supremacy yet denied access to the social competence and civic responsibility of Black Americans.

(Gray, 1995)

In addition, media often ’shift conversations of inequality away from structured social processes to matters of individual choice.’

(Gray, 1989)

This occurs by displacing the social with the personal and the complex with dramatic. (Gray, 1989)

For decades, TV consisted of ‘authentic’ representations of life in poor urban communities that reinforced a normative white middle class, or enlightened approaches to cultural difference privileging white middle

class subject positions to create racial oneness. (Gray, 1995)

14

The end result was a media landscape constructing a self/other and black/white binary grounded in restrictive scripts marking ‘whiteness as civilized, rational, ordered, disciplined, and morally superior and leaves

people of color undisciplined, unrefined, primitive, inappropriately sexual, emotional, and unstable.’ (Helene Shugart 2007)

These discourses create a ‘carefully constructed chasm between [white and black].’

(Shugart, 118)

These racial codes also create a dichotomy of deficient/gifted individuals and create obstructions to understanding that those trapped in underclass

have same qualities but lack options and opportunities to realize them due to unemployment, industrial relocation, ineffective social policies,

power inequalities, and racism. (Gray, 1989, 384)

KEY THEORYConstructed racial identities are central to social organization. Race provides meaning, assigns positions and operates as an explanatory

concept defining and maintaining difference. (Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the other’ 1997)

15

The Wire Reading Listhttps://www.kings.uwo.ca/kings/assets/File/academics/sociology/essays/Racial-Stereotypes-in-The-Wire.pdfhttps://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/bpurnell/pdf/syllabus-afs-220-the-wire-spring-2012.pdfhttps://tvseries.revues.org/1138http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/22/stealing-life

DECONSTRUCTING THE WIREupwardly mobile?

16