Three Scenes From The Wire That Showed Me How Privileged I Am
I was in my early 20s when The Wire made its historic and (in the beginning) critically ignored run on HBO. All told, I watched the entire series front to back at least five times (but it was probably more like six or seven).
This past Christmas my wife gifted me Jonathan Abrams’ book, “All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire.” Published in 2018, it’s a retrospective of the series seen through the eyes of the actors and people behind the camera (show runners, cinematographers, writers, etc.). It’s a fantastic read for fans of the show, and I relived the emotional and intellectual impact the series had on me.
I kept reliving three scenes.
There are many, many classic scenes in The Wire. But the three that affected me, that gave me a new perspective on my privilege, weren’t show-altering revelations or major characters getting killed off.
They were simple scenes that impacted me because they looked nothing like my own life.
In the second season Bodie’s crew has a gunfight with a rival crew. A mother — not a series regular — is in her home when she hears shots and tells her nine-year-old to hide under the bed. The gunfight plays out and when it’s done, she emerges from hiding and starts calling for her son to get ready for school. She says, “All right, boy, drama done! Get ready for school!” Unfortunately, her son doesn’t answer because he was shot and killed.
But that’s not what impacted me.
What shocked me was her attitude after a blazing gunfight occurred on her doorstep.
Drama done? Get ready for school?
That’s it?
If that happened where I grew up there’d be trauma counsellors, manhunts, arrests, memorials, cancelled school, people shaking and holding their knees, political reform, gun laws…it wouldn’t end. Of course I knew as part of the zeitgeist — studying rap and watching conventional shows — that the projects were dangerous and poor, but now I saw it in a way I hadn’t before.
I saw that in “the greatest country in the world” there were neighbourhoods as dangerous as those in countries broken by civil war, where gun violence and drug wars were so commonplace that it barely interrupts your morning.
Drama done. Time for school.
Unbelievable.
On my second watch-through I came across a scene that was from the first or second season, but could have occurred anywhere throughout the show. Cedric Daniels, Sgt. Carver, Kima Greggs and a couple of others were sitting around talking about the case. As usual, I was wrapped up in the dialogue, but then something struck me:
All the characters were Black.
And I didn’t notice.
And not only that, I had gone through an entire cycle of the show without noticing.
Having only black characters onscreen is rare enough today, but in the early 2000s it was practically unheard of, unless the scene was about being Black, or the show itself was purposefully a “Black” show (like the Fresh Prince).
But this, this was just people talking about their job.
The more I watched, the more I noticed scenes where Black people were the only ones on camera — or in the majority — but it was rarely about being Black. It’s just the way it was.
How about that. A show treating Black people as people first.
At first I thought it was wonderful, then I was sad that it was something I noticed at all. It made me question my own life, and why there were so few non-whites in it.
Finally, and most importantly, is what I call the “institutional racism” scene. Bodie and Poot were sitting on a public bench. A cop drove up and ordered them to “move along”. They protested, but did get up and walk on.
I thought, that’s a public bench. That’ what it’s for: citizens to sit on. They hadn’t done anything wrong, they were just sitting there. Again, if it happened to me and a friend in St. John’s?
We’d laugh in the cop’s face. We’d get belligerent. Demand his badge number. We’d report him.
Those options weren’t available to Bodie and Poot. They were the wrong colour in the wrong neighbourhood. If they did any of that?
I shudder to think.
In other words, they were victims of institutional racism. The cop who told them to move was Black, so it wasn’t straightforward racism. They were just young black men hanging out in a particular neighbourhood, and that made them automatically suspicious. The institution (Baltimore Police) watched young black men in particular neighbourhoods, and that’s what it did here.
The Wire is the best show ever made. It was a show you had to remind yourself was fiction. By making a damaged American city its main character it showed the audience facets of American life never seen before.
And it made a simple white dude from rural Newfoundland understand how privileged he is. Whether that privilege is white, Canadian, rural, or all of the above, I’m not sure. All I know is that some of the most fundamental components of society that I don’t even think about — due process, equality, and safety — don’t exist if you’re the wrong colour in the wrong neighbourhood.
Not even in the “best”country in the world.
And in a show laden with tragedy, that’s the most tragic of all.
