A nine-part essay by crime gang expert Sudhir Venkatesh, who sat with a bunch of members and ex-members of the Chicago drug trade to watch the show weekly, throughout most of the 5th season. Includes several Q&A rounds between the ghetto guys and the (mostly) mid-class white readers of Venkathesh’s blog.
The show actually does get a lot of stuff right. But are the little details they point out in between episodes what I find most fascinating. The Wire is as pessimistic as you can get from a TV show, but not even that matches its real-life counterpart. Sometimes the very nature of a long-running series gets in the way of what the thugs consider plausible.
“They’re making us wait,” said Orlando. “See, that’s when this stuff gets unreal. When they start making you feel like you could actually get somewhere in the ghetto.”
“What do you mean, ‘get somewhere?’” I asked.
“In the ‘hood, everything changes. Nothing happens the right way,” he replied.
“Give me an example,” I said.
“Well, like what’s happening with Marlo and Omar,” he replied right away. “In the ghetto, you never have this kind of thing last so long. People kill each other right away, or not at all.”
And the fact that the writers are mostly white…
“White folks always love to keep these uppity [characters] alive. No way [a self-righteous, disrespectful gangster] survive in East New York more than a minute!”
“I’d let a black man write it, first of all,” said Shine. “That way, you’d have real winners and losers. Like I said, white folk want you to believe that everyone is screwed up, everyone is getting their piece [of the action]. True, but it’s different if you’re white. It’s never as bad as it is when you’re black.
Still, the gang members got into it to the point of betting as much as $8000 on the outcome of some of the character’s fates.
It’s a good read, even if you’re unfamiliar with the show. It made me think about how sophisticated a traditionally ‘dumbing’ medium can be, actually making the audience smarter. Damn, even videogames these days do some fine, ambitious job on portraying life in the streets you rarely find in traditional journalism.
It strikes me as a beautiful process how a fictional story, made to entertain, can send echoes through different channels and weave ties previously unthinkable of between academics, thugs and fans who end up discussing stuff that happens daily to living, breathing people.
