2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
"...And all the pieces matter"
On The Wire as a new form of urban sociology
Kaj van Zoelen
Master Thesis American Studies 15 June 2014 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1
Table of contents
Acknowledgements 3
Introduction 4
1. The history of Baltimore 10
2. Education and youth in The Wire 21
3. The mediated realism of The Wire 30
4. The War on Drugs and urban sociology 39
Conclusions 48 Sources 49 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3
Acknowledgements
This thesis owes much to the patience, guidance, advise and suggested revisions of drafts of my thesis advisor, Prof. Dr. Ruud Janssens. I am indebted to Frans de Vette, Marijke van Zoelen and Seema Pai for their patience, support and putting up with me during the time period I spent on this thesis. Last but not least, thanks to Fedor Lighthart for providing me with the initial idea for this thesis.
Introduction
“We’re building something here, detective, and we’re building it from scratch. And all the pieces matter”, Detective Lester Freamon says in episode six of the first season of The Wire, also named 'The Wire', referring to the case that his special police detail is trying to build against a drug dealing organization.1 It is an often quoted line from this television series. The second sentence is even quoted at the beginning of that very episode, in the citation that starts off each episode after the credit sequence. In a way, it is a mission statement of series co-creator David Simon, a former journalist who together with former police detective Ed Burns created a television show with which they wanted to do things that had never been done before in television. A series in which every detail, large and little, mattered and in which the matter at hand would be explored at from several angles. This matter being the so called War on Drugs, at least initially. But the reason The Wire is cited so often in academic (sociological) literature and indeed in this opening paragraph as well, is because it exemplifies the vision on the series that it is in fact not just a television show but also a new form of urban history and sociology, that achieves the goal of these branches of academia better than the academic work in these fields is and has been able to. Though my argument in this thesis will be more in the sociological field than the historical, in accordance with the already written work available.
For those who don't know already, The Wire is a television series that was broadcast from the year 2002 to the year 2008 on cable channel HBO. It consists of five seasons of each about twelve episodes (two seasons have thirteen episodes, two have twelve and one has only ten), making it sixty episodes in total. Each of those episodes lasts for fifty five to sixty minutes, excluding the ninety minute long finale, which means the series is roughly sixty hours long. In those
approximately sixty hours, The Wire tells a story that encompasses an entire modern American city. In the first season it starts off with focusing mostly on cops and drug dealers, presenting a new spin on the crime genre of American television by bypassing or subverting most of the genre tropes and clichés of other cop shows. The Wire does this by showing the perspective of not just the policemen and women chasing criminals, building a case and the inner workings of the police department they work in, but also the perspective of the inner city criminals they pursue and the way their drug dealing organization works. Plus the perspective of the drug addicts who are both victim and customer of the drug dealers. The Wire does not present a black and white moral view of the police as heroes fighting the good fight and the drug dealers as villains to be apprehended. Rather, it draws
parallels between the way the two are organized, and the ineffectiveness of the police in battling crime, while at the same time showing how a drug addict works very hard nearly every day to ensure his or her fix. The Wire shows the War on Drugs not only to be an ineffective way of dealing with the violent crime that accompanies drug dealing or the detrimental effect it has on the inner city neighborhoods it takes place in, but also shows it as eroding the morale and effectiveness of the police force itself.
The Wire does all this by not presenting an easy to digest narrative within one single episode,
by the end of which the cops have solved the case and the criminals are punished, but by taking a complex, all encompassing view. Not only are multiple perspectives highlighted, the story is
intricately detailed “and all the pieces matter.” A seemingly innocuous character detail from episode two might prove to be of decisive import to an event in episode eleven. The narrative is still
centered around a police investigation, but it's one that lasts all season and when it is ultimately 'solved' and brought to court, only street level drug dealers and some mid level management are punished, while the real targets of the investigation remain free or get off lightly. This is due to political and publicity concerns end up trumping the preferences of the policemen involved in the actual investigation. Meanwhile the police fails to protect witnesses who either end up dead or rescind their earlier statements, and nothing really changes on the streets: the arrested (young) street level drug dealers are quickly and easily replaced by other young men who have little economic alternative.
Creators Simon and Burns started out with the idea to present a different view on the War on Drugs and world of cops, addicts and dealers than had before been seen on American television, either in fiction series or on the nightly news and professional reportage. With little regard to the average viewer they crafted a complete world, that, in order to be fully understood or appreciated, requires attention from the first to the last minute of each episode with no distraction from
commercial breaks. There are no resolutions at the end of an episode except the last in the season, and even in that one, the story and the show just go on. And in different directions too, expanding its scope and viewpoint in the four seasons after the first, while all the time continuing the story of cops, dealers and addicts as a through line and the futility of the War on Drugs as context for and intertwining with new storylines and themes. In the first season the audience is mainly shown the mean streets of West Baltimore and the home and work environment of the police that works there. In the second season The Wire introduces Baltimore's port and its dockworkers, whose union is involved with a worldwide criminal organization to keep the port alive but which gets investigated by the police because of personal enmity between the union boss and a police major. Global capitalism eroding the already very weak, almost nonexistent power and position of the American
working man. In the third season, the politicians that have thus far been figures in the background take center stage, as a young, seemingly idealistic Baltimore City Council member challenges the incumbent mayor in the upcoming Democratic primary for the mayoral election (since the
Democrats are such a large presence in Baltimore, whoever wins the primary has the general election in the bag). The actual election and the first years of the new young mayor are spread out over the subsequent two seasons, and then the narcissism that can be already glimpsed during his campaign in the third season takes hold, together with a sense of political self preservation, over the apparent idealism he showed earlier. Another aspect of the third season is the return of the
prominence of the street scene by a second investigation against the drug dealer organization of season one, of which one leader tries to do something radically different by entering the legitimate business world. At the same time a police major (not the same from the previous season) also tries to make a radical difference in the neighborhood he works in by creating zones where the police won't interfere with drug dealers and addicts, drastically reducing violent crime in the rest of the neighborhood. An experiment that is doomed to fail once the media gets hold of it and the mayor's office has to deal with it from a politics and publicity point of view. The fourth season shifts the focus again, this time to the Baltimore inner city public school system and how several young kids that go to a middle (or junior high) school have trouble learning not for of lack of aptitude but because the way their environment shapes their character, behavior and way of thinking to a point where education simply seems to hardly matter or too hard to attain for them. At the same time, The
Wire exposes how the school system fails these young people and how similar that is to the
institutional failings of the police, politics and other institutions of the city that were created to help people and improve their lives but end up at best failing to do so and at worst often actively
obstructing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the fifth and final season Simon & co. take the fourth estate to task for failing to report on this properly, by introducing into The Wire a fictional version of The Baltimore Sun daily paper that gets caught up in the hunt for a fictional serial killer, created by two police detectives who use the funding they get to chase their serial killer for an illegal wiretap. Meanwhile, the story lines from previous seasons are continued, but these very real problems are ignored or minimized by The Sun.
One of the detectives responsible for the serial killer deception is ostensibly the main character of the show, or rather seems to be so at the start. He is in the opening scene, and
subsequent actions of his are the catalyst for the main plot of season one, the investigation of a drug organization by a special police detail. But the focus is not on him as it would be in a regular cop show; he shares the spotlight with many characters. In season four he is even largely absent. One could differentiate between a certain number of characters being more main characters while others
are definitely more peripheral, but what's more important is how they all form one big ensemble in which each plays their own unique role in an intricately crafted network of people. Many of these characters are based on real people or are composites of several real figures that David Simon and Ed Burns encountered in the two decades previous to the making of The Wire. Simon as a journalist for The Baltimore Sun, covering the police beat, which resulted in the book Homicide for which he stayed 'embedded' with the homicide department for a year, a book which got turned into a network television series in the early 1990s, though one that neither had the scope or ambition of The Wire and increasingly acquiesced to the demands of commercial television. Burns first as a Baltimore police detective in the 1980s and later as a middle school teacher (part of the inspiration for the school plot line in seasons four and five). In the second half of the 1990s the two partnered up and spent a year observing the life of addicts and teenaged drug dealers in one street in West Baltimore and writing the book The Corner, which they then turned into an Emmy-winning miniseries with the same name for HBO. In a way, The Wire starts out as a combination of the perspectives of these two books. Authenticity and realism were two of the goals of Simon and Burns that makes The Wire different from other television fiction and two of the reason it was ultimately praised very much by critics and taken seriously by academics. Part of this authenticity and realism comes from the complete and complex portrayal of urban life that is created over the course of five seasons and sixty hours.
However, this authenticity, comprehensiveness and realism of the portrayal and the value of those aspects of the show have been debated in academic circles in the years since the series ended in 2008. Publications such as Critical Inquiry, darkmatter and Criticism devoted whole issues to it, a number of books collected essays by various or single authors and a number of sociologists debated the merit of The Wire in relation to their field. Some even go so far as claiming that The
Wire could be regarded as a new form of ethnographic sociology, among them eminent scholars
such as Harvard's William Julius Wilson. Wilson wrote: “The Wire ... demonstrates the
interconnectedness of systemic urban inequality in a way that can be very difficult to illustrate in academic works. Due to the structure of academic research, scholarly works tend to focus on many of these issues in relative isolation.”2 The basis for this idea of interconnectedness goes back all the way to the Chicago School of sociology from the 1920s and 1930s. After World War I a group of scholars working at the University of Chicago, led by Robert Park, developed new sociological theories on urban sociology and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork. Central was the idea that cities function as systems in which residents,
2 Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson, '“Way Down In The Hole”: Systemic Urban Inequality and The Wire',
neighborhoods, and institutions are integrated into a broader ecological unit. The Chicago School's tenets were a reaction to the sociology of its era, which more often than not consisted of subjective philosophizing without any empirical research. Ethnographic closeness to the study material would give urban sociology and history a richness and depth it lacked before. Chicaco School researchers believed "true human nature" would reveal itself in the context of urban social relations. Their focus on qualitative methods and tendency to perceive the worlds they studied as completely isolated, however, did obscure the bigger picture sometimes. After World War II there was a so called Second Chicago School of Sociology, in which there was slightly more room for complex mapping of overlapping worlds. These ideas were continued in the work of C. Wright Mills from that same time period and into the 1960s, specifically his ideas that harked back to those of Robert Park on
ethnography and how the social scientist must take cognizance of biography, ontology and history and take into account the full complexity of human experience for his or her research rather than relying on statistics. He also went against prevalent ideas that only field research or ethnography with actually existing subjects can result in a pure account of urban life, convinced that details alone do not convince the reader/audience of anything worth having convictions about. In the last decade Andrew Abbot expanded on Mills’ ideas on convincing an audience with his work on what he calls lyrical sociology that can stimulate and engage the reader, a sociology that feels the excitement and human complexity of social situations instead of the at that point in time more prominent narrative of explanatory sociology. And that's where The Wire comes in.
Basing myself on the work of Wilson, and several other academics that posit The Wire as a new, extremely relevant form of urban history and sociology, I will further that argument in my thesis and expand on the idea of several scholars that The Wire is in fact a superior form of urban history and sociology, doing what the original Chicago School of Sociology set out to do better than current academia is capable of, both in terms of creating a complete sociological portrayal of an urban environment and incorporating recent urban history in that, and in terms of reaching a much wider audience outside of academia than academics writing academic work are currently capable of. Wilson specifically argues that The Wire realizes the dream of the Chicago school, showing the interconnectedness of systemic urban inequality in a way that can be very difficult in academic work which often focuses on issues in isolation. Simon Parker expands on this argument of Wilson by calling The Wire a 'fictional' social critique on television more effective than mainstream social sciences at revealing the spaces and people capitalism left behind, while David Beer and his writing colleagues ponder if The Wire does a better job of reaching audiences and possibly influencing social policy than social sciences can, at one point even wondering if The Wire is not doing the job of sociologists for them: “As such the show could be interpreted as doing our job for us, providing
an accessible and detailed sociological account of the world for a wide international audience outside of the academy.”3 They all work from the belief that The Wire is extremely authentic and realistic, a view that is supported by many other scholars, such as J.C. Schaub, Avram Gurland-Blaker, Peterson, James Braxton and many more. Schaub said: “With its realism, 'game frame,' and use of non-actors in leading roles, The Wire transgresses the boundary that separates traditional dramas from reality-based programming,” while Gurland Blaker called The Wire “a realistic portrait of Baltimore” and that David Simon “pins us with the ugly truth about our society.”45
Some do challenge this view however, like Tommy J. Curry claiming The Wire presents a class realism but not racial realism. Kenneth W. Warren's critique of Wilson's work is largely in the same racial vein.
I will take that debate and incorporate it into my argument for The Wire as new form of urban history and sociology. I will argue how The Wire, with its authenticity, complexity, and realism, realizes the ideals of prominent and important schools of thought in urban sociology in more complete ways that the scholars that developed these ideals ultimately couldn't and didn't. For that I will engage in the debate whether or not The Wire offers such a portrayal of the city, in what ways it does so that are relevant to urban sociology and the ideas on that of Park, Mills and Abbot. I will do this by building on the work of Wilson, Simon Parker, David Beer and others that invoke these sociologists of the past and their work to argue to take The Wire serious as a modern form of ethnography, that takes into account the full complexity of human experience within a sociological framework and is able to stimulate and engage the viewer despite being a fictional television series.
The Wire can reach an audience that academic sociological studies can't and has therefore
more of a chance of actually influencing policy (another ideal of The Chicago School). I will do so by first taking a chapter to explore the history of Baltimore and then analyzing The Wire in the context of this urban sociology and history and compare it to the historical literature. In chapter two, I will analyze how The Wire explores the inner city school system and youth life on the inner city streets from which they enter these schools (in seasons four), and compare that to existing sociological literature on the same subject. In the third chapter I shall analyze how The Wire portrays the media in season five and how this relates to the realism of the television series, and tie that into the academic and journalistic debate on said realism. In the final chapter I shall analyze how The Wire connects the various aspects of city life it depicts and how this makes it a new form of urban sociology, including the academic discussion on this very subject to back up my claim.
3 Ruth Penfold-Mounce, et al, 'The Wire as Social Science-fiction?', Sociology, Vol. 45/No. 1 (2011) 164.
4 J.C. Schaub, 'The Wire: Big Brother Is Not Watching You in Body-more, Murdaland‘, Journal of Popular Film and
Television, Vol. 38/No. 3 (2010) 131.
5 Avram Gurland-Blaker, 'The Wire as American Tragedy' in: Bzdak, David, ed. e.a., The Wire and Philosophy: This
1. The history of Baltimore
"The thing about the old days... they the old days", drug enforcer Slim Charles tells drug dealer Bodie in the third episode of the fourth season of The Wire, in response to Bodie unfavorably comparing the drug organization they're both working for to the previous organization the two used to work for.6 Despite Slim Charles' objections to thinking about the past (a personal philosophy of his that he talks about on several occasions), The Wire as a whole does not share this sentiment. Although some characters might be oblivious to the influence of the past on the present, or like Charles choose to ignore it, many others are very aware of their own history, that of Baltimore and even the history of America in a larger sense. By the end of the fifth season of The Wire, it has become crystal clear that creators David Simon and Ed Burns are likewise aware of their city's and their country's history. This awareness is an essential component of The Wire being the superior form of urban history and sociology others and myself claim it is. Therefore it is important to take a look at how the history of Baltimore informs the present as presented in the series, and to take a look at that history itself.
That historical awareness is visible in the way the past informs the personality and actions of characters like Frank Sobotka, the union leader who in the second season attempts to revitalize the port of Baltimore and bring back (at least a portion of) the business it used to have earlier in the twentieth century. That awareness is also visible in the cycles that the characters and character types go through. Detectives Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon find themselves frustrated by those outranking them in the police force time and again for political or career reasons, while trying to solve a case and arrest those connected to and in the drug trade. In the fifth and last season their frustration takes them so far that they fake the existence of a serial killer to use the funds they receive to pursue this fictional serial killer to run a wiretap (an illegal one) on their target drug dealer Marlo Stansfield. When at the end of season five McNulty sees the error of his ways and is fired for his actions, in a montage signaling the end of the series (each season ends on a montage showing the fates of various characters that played a part in that season, sometimes showing the conclusion to a storyline or what the future holds for a character after a storyline has concluded) young detective Leander Sydnor approaches Judge Phelan in a mirror scene of one of the first scenes of the first episode of the first season.7 McNulty had approached the same Judge Phelan in the exact same way (down to the way they unbutton their suit jackets) to go over the heads of his
6 Richard Price, 'Home Rooms', The Wire: the complete series (HBO, 2008). 7 David Simon, '-30-', The Wire: the complete series (HBO, 2008).
superiors to open up a case against a drug dealer (then it was Avon Barksdale). Although Sydnor following in McNulty's footsteps could be interpreted as the idealism of the young who haven't become cynical or resigned, other cycles of character types seen in the same montage sadly can't be interpreted as such. Omar Little, robber of drug dealers, may be the most beloved character of The
Wire (even president Obama named him as his favorite character) for his independence, refusal to
play by the rules of society (both by robbing drug dealers and by being openly gay in the macho environment of the ghetto), creating his own way of life and having a sense of humor about it.8 However, when teenager Michael Lee follows in his footsteps by robbing a front operation that launders money for Marlo Stansfields organization, brandishing the shotgun that was Omar's trademark weapon of choice, there can be no rejoicing. Michael was introduced in season four as one of four kids living in the West Baltimore ghetto neighborhoods that had been the setting for the drug deals of an earlier season, perhaps the smartest, most promising of the youngsters who took care of his younger brother. Only two years later, this fresh-faced teenager has become a seasoned killer. Similarly, at the same time we see heroin addict Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins is finally able to stay sober long enough, after several failed attempts to shake his habit over the course of the series, for his sister to trust him enough to invite him to dinner with her family. At the end of the show, we see Duquan "Dukie" Weems (another one of the four kids mentioned above, by now homeless and like Michael no longer going to school) firmly entrenched in his newfound heroin addiction. It's as if the showrunners are citing that old proverb: the more things change, the more they stay the same. In a larger sense, the aforementioned detectives and their attempt at apprehending Marlo Stansfield and thereby curtailing his organization mirrors their earlier attempts at doing the same to the organization of Avon Barksdale and Russell “Stringer” Bell. While they succeeded in destroying one dominant drug dealer's organization (which they were only able to due to internal strife within the organization), another was already taking its place in West Baltimore. History repeats itself.
Various claims towards the realism of The Wire are partially bolstered by the appearance of real life figures from the streets, police force or political apparatus of Baltimore. Most of these people played a part in the city's history rather than the present, literally injecting the present with a blast from the past. With a few exceptions, none of them appeared as themselves or even a fictional version of themselves. At times, the person appearing on the series was, however, also the
inspiration for a character or storyline already on the show. Jay Landsman as a character is a police sergeant in the homicide department, inspired by the real Jay Landsman, who worked as homicide detective in 1989 when David Simon as a journalist followed the homicide department for a year to
8 Michael A. Fletcher, 'Barack Obama: Wire Fan', in: Alvarez, Rafael, ed., The Wire: Truth Be Told (Edinburgh, 2009) 37-41.
write his nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.910 The real Landsman played a small part as Lieutenant Mello in the western district of the Baltimore police department. Donnie Andrews was one of the robbers of drug dealers that formed the inspiration for Omar Little. In the fourth season, he has a small role as a cellmate of Omar. Reformed drug lord Melvin Williams played The Deacon in the last three seasons of the series, but is also one of a few real life persons Avon Barksdale is based on. Williams ruled part of West Baltimore in the early 1980s, until a FBI operation (to which then Baltimore police detective and later co-creator of The Wire Ed Burns was detached) was able to apprehend him.11 This is one of several ways the two decades preceding The
Wire made their way into the stories told on the show. Another is the coded communication with
which Barksdale's crew evades the police in season one, using pagers, public payphones and a number code. Only after this code is deciphered, the wiretap the police runs on the payphones starts paying off and the police is able to make a case against the Barksdale organization. This way of communication, including the exact code, was used by Melvin Williams' organization in the early 1980s, and the cracking of that code led to his apprehension by the FBI.12 Another example of recent history of Baltimore finding its way into the present of the series is the demolition of the Franklin Terrace housing project towers in the first episode of season three, which is based on the real life demolition of the Lexington Terrace two years prior to the start of the series.13
These are just a few examples of the (recent) past informing the present of The Wire in a very literal way. As this partially shows (and as we will continue to see in the next chapters) history weighs heavily on the present as presented in the show, and thus it is important to take a closer look at that history of Baltimore and the existing literature on this history. This writing of the city's history is, after all, part of the academic work on the urban environment that I claim is surpassed by the show as an urban sociological portrayal of an urban environment.
In academic writings on The Wire, one of the most mentioned historical books in notes and references is Baltimore: the Building of an American City by Sherry H. Olson, a monograph on the city's history from its inception in 1730 up to the 1970s.14 Edward Muller, history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote this about the book: “Olson's Baltimore is an important book for the
9 David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (New York, 1991)
10 Ryan Brooks, 'The Narrative Production of ‘Real Police’', in Potter, Tiffany and C.W. Marshall, ed., The Wire:
Urban Decay and American Television (New York, 2009) 64-77.
11 Alvarez, The Wire: Truth Be Told, 104-116. 12 Ibid.
13 Peter Clandfield, 'ʻWe Ain't Got No Yardʼ: Crime, Development and Urban Environment', in: Potter and Marshall, ed., The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, 37-49.
city of Baltimore, for historical geography, and for the study of the urban past.”15
His colleague Richard Cox made a similar claim, writing on the book that “this is by far the most important publication on Baltimore's history to appear.”16
Gary Browne of the University of Maryland praised the book for “its enormous fund of information about Baltimore, and its interesting inter-weaving of economic, geographic, and social pat-terns of development,” and claims that “Urban specialists ... should find Olson's insights into the urban historical process provocative and rewarding.”17
Which, if true, would make it a perfect precursor to The Wire. Olson herself introduces Baltimore: the
Building of an American City as being about “city building, an internal dynamic of the city-state
and how Baltimoreans see themselves and their situation. In that sense, Baltimore is America, in its rhythm of building up and tearing down, swarming and dispersing, getting and spending, birthing and dying, sharing and competing.”18
In her book, Olson tracks the development of Baltimore from before its official foundation in the eighteenth century to the 1970s, through the city's constant rise and fall and returning riots and strikes. The focus lies on municipal economic and social development in the nineteenth century, structured in a boom and bust cycle. Baltimore was founded in 1730, but the settlement did not grow into a city for the next hundred years. The period before the foundation is often called Baltimore's empty century, but according to Olsen this belies the rapid transformations that took place in the region, reflecting what happened in Europe at the time.19 In 1730 Baltimore Town, Jones Town and Fells Point merged into the city of Baltimore.20 By midcentury Baltimore was still a collection of twenty-five houses, but in the second half of the eighteenth century this collection grows into a town of thirty thousand inhabitants and the centre of Maryland, thanks to several international wars during this period from which Baltimore was able to profit.21 Towards the end of the century, the inhabitants started to think of Baltimore as a city, and in 1796 it was incorporated as such, while its harbor capabilities especially made for economic growth.22 With prosperity also came poverty without security, and the growth came in fits. However, commerce prevailed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which allowed for the building of monuments and
improvement of public institutions such as fire and disease prevention. This was necessary since
15 Edward K. Muller, review of Baltimore: The Building of an American City, by Sherry H. Olson, The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 13/No. 1 (Summer, 1982) 164-166.
16 Richard J. Cox, review of Baltimore: The Building of an American City, by Sherry H. Olson, The Journal of
American History, Vol. 68/No. 3 (December, 1981), 639.
17 Gary L. Browne, review of Baltimore: The Building of an American City, by Sherry H. Olson, The American
Historical Review, Vol. 86/No. 3 (June 1981) 657.
18 Sherry H. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City (Baltimore, 1980) ix. 19 Ibid, 1-3.
20 Ibid, 7. 21 Ibid, 10. 22 Ibid, 26.
progress was frequently undercut by fire, floods and diseases.23 Meanwhile, the competition with Philadelphia caused Baltimore to pioneer the building of railroads to and through the city.24
In the early 1830s the immigration numbers doubled every year, mostly including people from England, Ireland and Germany. New disease outbreaks followed the immigrants, while
statewide repression of the black population increased.25 Both the Irish and Germans kept coming in later decades as well, and with the waves of immigration come waves of prosperity and recovery (though not always related), while violence and sanitary problems intensified, from the nationwide crisis of 1837 onwards until 1860. In this period Baltimore's “population, work force, number of houses and it's street mileage” doubled, requiring reorganization of the city.26
In 1851, Baltimore City is divorced from Baltimore County.27 During the Civil War, due to its location between North and South, the city was divided while the governor urged a neutral position. Though the city saw no actual warfare because of this, its location also prevented the development other cities more
Northern and inland enjoyed during the war, as these cities saw a wartime boom by being involved with either side.28 The upside of not getting a wartime boom was the lack of a postwar depression, and economy and industry grew right after the war. The seven years following the war are referred to by Olson as Baltimore's “seven fat years”, before the national depression of 1873 sets in “seven lean years”.29
In the latter, floods and droughts plague the city once more, as did riots and strikes towards the end of the “lean years”.30
Racial segregation started in the schools in 1867.31 The up and down growth rhythm in the last decades of the nineteenth century are exemplified by “the boom year of 1886, the depression winter of 1893 and the year of business concentration of 1898”.
Meanwhile the labor force was increasingly brutalized or even replaced by machinery.32 As
electricity was introduced, with it came electric transit and more annexation of the area surrounding the expanding city. Towards the end of the century, epidemics were contained and diseases ceased to be seasonal disasters.33
The national Progressive movement of the early twentieth century was reflected in the plans of the mayor of Baltimore, but the allocated funds for these had to be used for the recovery of the great fire of 1904, which laid waste to the entire inner city that existed in 1730. Together with 23 Olson, Baltimore, 41-52, 61-63, 71. 24 Ibid, 73. 25 Ibid, 91-97. 26 Ibid, 102-103. 27 Ibid, 135. 28 Ibid, 144-145. 29 Ibid, 149-150. 30 Ibid, 162-167, 194-197. 31 Ibid, 187. 32 Ibid, 199-203. 33 Ibid, 212, 236.
building the city center, the sewage plans were finally put into action (and finished in 1911), while industrial development within the city limits increased.34 In World War I, Baltimore's geographical position and naval capabilities once again served it well. Bethlehem Steel became the region's largest business.35 As the growth and optimism continued in the 1920s, however, the average Baltimorean was left wondering how it benefitted him or her. White flight out of urban to suburban area's starts in this decade, while Baltimore was a “center of resistance to prohibition.” Said growth and optimism got buried under the burden of the Great Depression, as elsewhere.36 However, federal money and the return of alcohol reinvigorated Baltimore citizens. Each subsequent war was a boon for Baltimore economy, as its shipbuilding business boomed, while each period after a war became a recession.37 The inner city districts, more and more exclusively African-American, did not benefit from this.38
As an overview and introduction to the history of Baltimore, Olson's book does serve its purpose, but as Gary Browne of the University of Maryland points out, structurally the book is confusing at times and it lacks a real ending, conclusion or summary chapter.39 Also lacking is much of the promised analysis on how this history of Baltimore is exemplary for the greater history of the United States or how the former can lend understanding to the latter. In that respect, it comes up short in comparison to The Wire, which despite its attention to local detail and investment in Baltimore as city and community, makes good on the promise of David Simon that “the stories are more universal than this; they resonate not just in West Baltimore, but in East St. Louis, North Philadelphia, and South Chicago.”40
However, there are also interesting similarities between book and series. The cutting of corners in development to save money, the ineffective decision making resulting in public works plans not being carried out for decades, the latter being a recurring theme in Olson's book, recurs on The Wire. The way the fire departments budget keeps getting cut in the years before the fire of 1904 as described in the book is reflected in the “do more with less” motif that recurs throughout the series.41 The problems in the school system as seen in The Wire go way back to before the abolition of slavery, according to Olson, but that will be explored in more detail in the next chapter.42 The importance of the waterfront for every boom cycle of the city in the book makes for an interesting contrast with the way it's decline in the show makes making a living in that 34 Olson, Baltimore, 245-265. 35 Ibid, 292. 36 Ibid, 302, 325, 331-338. 37 Ibid, 347. 38 Ibid, 382.
39 Browne, review of Baltimore, by Olson, 657.
40 David Simon, 'Introduction', in: Alvarez, The Wire: Truth Be Told, 30. 41 Olson, Baltimore, 245-265
business quite hard, while the seniority rules that are established in the book have its repercussions for young stevedores in The Wire. In the above cited introduction to Olson's book, she begins to explain her approach with the words “city building”, which in itself is telling.43
Despite what the above summary of her history of Baltimore or the just mentioned similarities with The Wire might indicate, her focus is very much on the way Baltimore developed physically. As Edward Muller, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, puts it:
Olson interprets this geographical landscape through an examination of the process of city building. In her view, city-building forces not only include the familiar elements of changing technologies, physical planning, and socioeconomic mobilities (or immobilities) but also include the wielding of power, prevailing ideologies, and local politics.44
Thus her examination of Baltimore is seen through the prism of city building, rather than the more complex (though people oriented) approach of The Wire, making for a dryer, less engaging
sociological text. Not quite the 'lyrical sociology' of Andrew Abbot that Ruth Penfold-Mounce, David Beer and Roger Burrows claim The Wire is.45 But we will return to that in chapter four. Resegregation via living space is seen in both Olson's book and in The Wire, which links both to another book on Baltimore history that looks at this history through its buildings, albeit in a
different manner: Antero Pietila's Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American
City.
With Not In My Neighborhood, Pietila intends to examine “how real estate discrimination of Jews and African Americans shaped the cities of the United States,” covering the history of this subject from the first suburbanization in the 1880s until the twenty-first century. Like Olson, he claims that his focus, on the residential real estate practices of Baltimore, Maryland, is really exemplary for all of America: “The tools of discrimination were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.”46 What follows is a summary of this attempt (using the racial epithets Pietila uses in his book), to provide another perspective on Baltimore history.
Pietila only briefly covers the last decades of the nineteenth century, despite the statement in the preface, to set the stage as it were, for the events that follow the 1904 fire that ruined part of the inner city, as mentioned by Olson. In the first decade of the twentieth century segregation increased
43 Olson, Baltimore, ix.
44 Muller, review of Baltimore, by Olson, 164-166.
45 Penfold-Mounce, e.a., 'The Wire as Social Science-fiction?', 162-164.
and was made into law, all the way up to the Supreme Court (Plessy vs. Ferguson) and
suburbanization took flight, encouraged by first electric street cars and then automobiles, shortening distances a great deal.47 A consequence of an African-American buying a home on a white street in 1910 was the introduction of a succession pattern: As white people moved out of streets and neighborhoods, Jewish people moved in, and ultimately black people moved to those places when demand in Jewish districts went down.48 At the end of 1910, a residential segregation bill was passed. However, it was deemed illegal and it wasn't until the fourth attempt in 1913 that the architects of the law were able to make it stick. Until the Supreme Court nullified it in 1917.49 Pietila posits that eugenics, the science of racism stemming from Progressivist ideals that resulted in immigration quota in 1920 and 1924 echoes in obvious or indirect manner throughout the rest of his book.50 One of the first somewhat ironic consequences of the halt of immigration was that big-city industries had to hire African-Americans were they wouldn't before, resulting in mass black migration from the country to the city.51 Covenants became the new tool of racial residential segregation, condemnation of land another.52 Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) enforced these covenants, while the HOLC (Home Owners Loan Corporation) mapped the real estate market of America in terms of risk, with non-whites being a risk to be avoided at all cost.53 During World War II the influx of black laborers who could now find work in the war industry caused overcrowding and decreased the quality of living in the black districts.54
After the first black homeowner got a house on a white block in 1944, the white flight phenomenon took off. So called blockbusters (named after Allied bombs that destroyed cities in Germany) saw opportunities and started buying houses from fleeing whites and selling them to blacks for much higher prices than the values of the houses warranted, on payment plans that were very unfair to the new owners, often stuck in housing without baths or even running water – while still barred from actual good homes in all white neighborhoods.55 In 1948 the Supreme Court deigned illegal the enforcement of the covenants that did this barring – though not the private practice.56 It was through such means that Jews were kept out of a number of white neighborhoods
47 Pietila, Not In My Neighborhood, 6-10. 48 Ibid, 15. 49 Ibid, 22-32. 50 Ibid, 46. 51 Ibid, 47. 52 Ibid, 48-49. 53 Ibid, 61-74. 54 Ibid, 78-79. 55 Ibid, 89-104. 56 Ibid, 107.
in Baltimore or their admittance into new apartment buildings was limited by quota.57
The blockbusters were of all races, and in the 1950s even a black blockbuster teamed up with a Jewish blockbuster to use particular aggressive business tactics to profit – though he believed to contribute to the civil rights struggle by integrating neighborhoods, as was the black community's stance on blockbusting, despite said integration never lasting long but rather being a short period of desegregation before re-segregation. In a similar manner white flight wasn't always motivated by racial prejudice, or at least more than that: financial fears. Whites were afraid that their houses would drop in value in a black or mixed neighborhood, and sold as soon as possible to save money and investment.58 Public services like regular garbage pickup often went with the white people.59 The Civil Rights Act of 1968 included provisions for fair housing and its enforcement.60 As public transport increasingly failed and people took to private cars to make distances even less of an issue, more and more white people moved to Baltimore county, and with them went stores, businesses and industries.61 Zoning and rezoning kept out black and poor white people, while so called expulsive zoning drove out most black people that already lived there.62 In the last few decades blacks have moved into the suburbs, but racial change has been slower than traditional in the city. The cycle in which first Jews move there, whites move away, then blacks move in and Jews move away again, does continue.63
Pietila's book on Baltimore comes recommended by the likes of David Roediger, authority in the field of American race relations, whose praise is quoted on the jacket of the book: “Antero Pielita brings to this compelling story the eye for local detail of a veteran journalist, alongside an impressive knowledge of the nation's history and Baltimore's place in it.”64 Pielita was born in Finland, but like Olson has been a Baltimore native for a very long time, covering the city for local newspaper The Baltimore Sun for thirty-five years. He was a colleague of David Simon for some time there. Like Simon, Pietila is quite critical of his former employer. Simon used the fifth season of The Wire to criticize the paper's current state and way of conducting its affairs (more focus on easy to read, shallow news items, while leaving the more challenging and 'real' stories of Baltimore and its streets unreported, and firing the experienced journalists who've been with the paper for decades to cut costs even when the paper is doing fine). Pietila shows in his book that the past of the newspaper wasn't exactly rosy either. While doing research for Not In My Neighborhood, he came
57 Pietila, Not In My Neighborhood, 134-143. 58 Ibid, 148-158, 171-172. 59 Ibid, 186. 60 Ibid, 196-197 61 Ibid, 220. 62 Ibid, 225-227, 232. 63 Ibid, 240-247. 64 Ibid.
across evidence again and again that The Sun used to be very racist. It all started in the late nineteenth century when the newspaper was bought by segregationists, and continued in the twentieth century when it got a reputation for its anti-Semitism. It wasn't until the 1960s that the paper started to change its stance and became less conservative, Pietila writes. Though one wonders if Pietila’s observation of this change in the 1960s has something to do with the fact that he came to Baltimore and The Sun in 1964 himself.65 His far from positive portrayal and descriptions of The
Sun in his book tie in with the negative way the paper is depicted in The Wire, even if the criticisms
leveled at the Baltimore newspaper differ in specific content. It is not the only link to the series. The numerous descriptions of the row houses of Baltimore, that give the city a somewhat unique look and feel compared to most major American cities, recall the various images of such row houses as both background and foreground setting of The Wire. Then there is the pattern of the politician who wants to become mayor of the city and then move on to governor as fast as possible, like Teddy McKeldin in the 1940s and the fictional Tommy Carcetti on The Wire.66 Politically there's also the fact that for about the last hundred and fifty years Baltimore has been a Democratic stronghold, with a few years here and there as exception, mentioned throughout the book. In the series it has gotten so far that the Democratic primary for the mayoral elections are seen as the real elections, while the election against the Republican candidate is treated as an afterthought and doesn't even take place onscreen. An interesting contrast is how in The Wire, during the mayoral election it is constantly mentioned how hard it has become for a white man to win the city. This despite Not In
My Neighborhood showing that only a few decades earlier, the first black people were voted in
public office.67 What the book does show, at least from a housing perspective, is how the inner city neighborhoods became segregated, how black only communities came into existence, how they were then neglected and how some of them became a “dysfunctional pocket of concentrated poverty where human life was cheap and drugs and sex plentiful”.68
This sets the stage for one of the major arguments of The Wire: how the War on Drugs has become a war on the poor people in the
American inner cities, mostly the poor black people, and so in a way is both a class and race war. Although Antero Pietila is a journalist, his research is well done and academically sound. As Peter Eisenstadt puts it: “His work is history of the highest order, drawing from enough primary and time-tested secondary sources to pass muster with the most footnote-craving professional
65 Pietila, Not In My Neighborhood, 38, 231. 66 Ibid, 94-95.
67 Ibid, 206. 68 Ibid, 244.
historian.”69
His Not In My Neighborhood is a better, clearer structured book than Olson's study of Baltimore history. Of course, Olson covered a much larger time frame and very diverse range of subjects, resulting from time to time in a somewhat scatterbrained affair. Pietila's focus greatly benefits his detailed study of race relations in residential dealings and politics in Baltimore. He succeeds in achieving his goals much more than Olson did. On the other hand, Olson's goals were larger and more all-encompassing. As such, together the books are a testament to the idea that The
Wire succeeds where academic literature fails, in this case in the field of urban history, in creating a
complete portrayal of the city of Baltimore. Olson attempts this in her account of the city's history, but fails by being somewhat scattershot, missing structure despite her chronological approach. As a result of her lack of focus in general and at times her focus on telling the history through the prism of city building, her portrayal of Baltimore lacks the complete overview of the city and its history. Pietila does have focus and structure, but lacks that overview and completeness precisely because he chooses not to focus on that bigger picture of Baltimore. As a result, neither is able to provide that complete portrayal of the city that The Wire does. Now, The Wire of course doesn't provide a historical overview of Baltimore, although in chapter four we will see how by showing different stages of dilapidation of the urban working class in Baltimore, The Wire does show how broader sociological and economic forces beyond the neighborhoods themselves have chipped away at the inner city economy until it became what it is now. Showing how these forces are connected to inner city life is what makes The Wire a more complete portrayal of city life than either of these historical books provide, either by trying and failing or by not trying at all. This divide between failed
attempts at a complete portrayal on the one hand and more detailed, better written and argued accounts of parts of the city that only zero in on certain aspects is exemplary for what happens in urban sociology and why The Wire provides something that is currently lacking in academia, as I will explain further in chapter four. At the same time these books do provide, to a certain extent, a historical framework that helps understand the world of The Wire and as such should not be entirely dismissed in favor of The Wire.
69 Peter Eisenstadt, review of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, by Antero Pietila, in: The Business History Review, Vol. 86/No. 2 (summer 2012), 383-385.
2. Education and youth in The Wire
"Academics?! What, they gonn' study your study? When do this shit change?," Howard “Bunny” Colvin says to Dr. David Parenti in the final episode of the fourth season of The Wire, exasperated.70 Colvin, a former police Major with thirty years on the force, worked with Parenti for most of the season on a project that tried to reach the most troubled young teens at Edward J. Tilghman Middle School by placing them in a special class, overseen by Colvin. By the end of the season the project is shut down, because of concerns over standardized test scores, and Parenti tries to assuage
Colvin's anger over this cancellation. But Colvin is having none of Parenti's academic argument. His indignation is shared by viewers and makers of the series alike, the former having seen the social ills inherent in the current public school system and the need for change, because the latter showed it to them over the course of season four of The Wire. This chapter contains a more in-depth examination of this portrayal of the public school system and the young people enrolled in it, and a comparison to some literature that touches upon similar concerns.
In the first three seasons, the series showed the failure of American systems and institutions by zooming in on how these failing effected the people of the city of Baltimore. In season one, starting out with the police and life in the (overwhelmingly African-American) streets of West Baltimore, the War on Drugs is shown as not only ineffective but actively damaging police and West Baltimore. Then in season two the (Caucasian) dockworkers and the port, their part of Baltimore, is added to this picture of the American city, showing how they are interconnected (and connected by the drug trade). In season three the focus was shifted back again to the streets, but added the layer of politics and politicians, showing again how this top layer of Baltimoreans is connected to and influenced by life elsewhere in the city, and vice versa. The possibility of reform is also an important theme, both in the attempt of drug dealer Stringer Bell to become a legitimate businessman and in that of police Major Colvin to reduce drug related violence in the Western District of Baltimore by creating a zone of a few uninhabited blocks where drug trade will be tolerated by the police. The connections between politics and the rest of the city are continued in seasons four and five (the reform is not), but season four also contains what is perhaps The Wire's most powerful skewering of an institution that is supposed to service the citizens for which it was created but ended up becoming an end of its own: the public education system. In the preceding seasons the creators and showrunners already showed how West Baltimore youth gets caught up in the drug trade (and therefore also in the War on Drugs), with tragic results at times, but in season
four the focus is put upon a group of even younger teens. The choice to not focus on high school students but on middle school students was made by Burns (not only a former police detective, but also a former public school teacher) and Simon because, according to Burns, by the time of high school, most of the important choices in the life of an inner city kid have already been made, to which Simon has added “What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has.”71
The four West Baltimore kids whose story is told in season four (and partly in season five) are Michael Lee, Duquan "Dukie" Weems, Namond Brice and Randy Wagstaff. These four friends start out by attending Edward J. Tilghman Middle School in the eighth grade, but by the end of the season none are enrolled anymore, and only one of them is shown to make it to high school, but with no thanks to the school system. They're all the same age, but the more soft-spoken of the four, Michael takes on a leader role among his friends. Not only is he physically the strongest and quickest (throughout the series he beats up several other kids to protect his friends), but he also takes care of his younger brother Aaron, nicknamed Bug, and more and more of his friend Dukie, whose parents are drug addicts, just like Michael's mother. None of these parents seems to do much parenting, being absent whether home or not. It is hinted that Michael was molested by his stepdad, Bug's father. Because of all this, Michael has a deep mistrust of adults and authority figures, on either side of the law. He alone turns down a cash offer offered to every kid in the street by drug dealer Marlo Stanfield, who emerged as the dominant dealer in the area after Avon Barksdale was sent to prison for a long time and Barksdale's right hand man Stringer Bell was killed, at the end of season three. Michael also turns down Dennis “Cutty” Wise when this ex-convict who now runs a boxing school offers to teach him boxing. Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski's attempts at reaching him as his math teacher fall on deaf ears, Michael does not do his homework or participate in class. Twenty year old Bodie, a street corner lever drug dealer who used to work for the Barksdale organization, but now works for Marlo's, tries to recruit Michael but Michael will have none of it. Chris Partley, Marlo's right hand man and main enforcer, keeps offering, exactly because of his refusal. The way Michael carries himself, signaling his independence not only verbally with his refusals but also with his body language, is what Elijah Anderson calls an important part of the street code in his Code of
the Street book.72 Only when Bug's father returns from prison and Michael wants him out of his life as fast and as complete as possible, does he give in to Chris Partlow. In exchange for Partlow killing Bug's father, Michael will work for him and be a 'soldier' of Marlo's organization, selling drugs on the street corner. Marlo provides Michael with a place to live for him and Bug, away from their mother. Under Partlow's tutelage, the soft-spoken Michael becomes a cold-blooded killer. School no
71 Alvarez, The Wire: Truth Be Told, 299.
longer has any meaning for him, if it ever had. He does continue to take care of Dukie by giving him a place to live after Dukie's parents are evicted. However, over a year the violence takes its toll on Michael and he becomes more and more withdrawn, to the point where his new associates come to distrust him. This ultimately leads to a confrontation where Michael kills Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, Partlow's right hand and partner in crime. After that he regains his relative independence and becomes a robber of drug dealers, like the by then deceased Omar, completing the cycle mentioned in the first chapter.
Dukie suffers a no less tragic fate by the end of season five. Because of his drug addicted parents' extreme poverty, Dukie hardly has any clothes, nor the means to bathe regularly. His smell and look make him the frequent target of bullying, except for when his friends protect him. Randy gets him snacks to eat in the morning while walking to school. He gets second-hand school supplies from assistant principal Marcia Donnelly. Math teacher Pryzbylewski, nicknamed Prez by his pupils, takes pity on him. Prez gives Dukie a new set of clothes, but soon these are sold for drug money by his parents. Prez then offers him the opportunity to shower in the gym showers before school starts and to keep a second set of clothes he can wear after that shower in a school locker. Mr. Pryzbylewski also provides Dukie with food during lunchtime. Dukie becomes close to Prez and helps him discover a computer in the school storage room and when the teacher starts to use the computer to teach, Dukie turns out to be one of the more competent math students and learns new computer skills. However, this unexpected improvement gets him promoted to ninth grade (and thus, high school), in an attempt of the school to make it look like their students are doing better than they really are. Without the support system of his friends and Prez, Dukie quickly drops out and joins his friend Michael on the corner, selling drugs. He does not fit in with Michael's crew though, and is not respected by the other dealers. Michael offers Dukie to pay him for watching Bug, and even though Dukie finds this emasculating he accepts. He tries to get a normal job, but can't, except with a heroin-addicted arabber, whose offer he is forced to take after Michael has to go on the run from the Stanfield organization.73 Dukie shows up at the Edward J. Tilghman Middle School one day to ask his old teacher Prez for money to go back to school and get his GED, but it is a scam and Dukie shares the money with the arabber to buy heroin. As mentioned before, the last image of Dukie is him shooting heroin into his arm in a dark alleyway.
Randy Wagstaff seems the most cheerful at the start of the story of the foursome, partly thanks to his friendly demeanor and trademark smile. He lives with a caring foster mother, who
73 An arabber is a street merchant selling fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. Once a not uncommon sight in cities on the East Coast of the United States in the 19th century, and after the Civil War increasingly mostly an African-American profession, the arabber has all but vanished from the American cityscape, except for that of Baltimore, where this tradition is still carried on by a handful of arabbers in the poorer parts of town.
gave him some discipline and stability the others lack. He makes a little money selling snacks and drinks to both children in school and drug dealers standing on corners day and night. He has a keen interest in math as he thinks it will help him with his business endeavors, endearing himself to Prez. Randy accidentally gets involved in the murder of a drug dealer named Lex when he passes a message along to someone that leads to a deathly trap for Lex. When he gets caught with his snack business in school, he tries to prevent his foster mother from finding out he's in trouble by
confessing to his knowledge of a murder. This gets the police involved, though thanks to
Pryzbylewski trying to protect him from the system he is not processed through the usual channels but taken care of by Sergeant Ellis Carver, an old colleague of Pryzbylewski from his former career in the police department. Carver interviews him and returns him to his foster mother, ensuring her that Randy is a good kid. Thanks to the carelessness of Carver's old partner Herc, however, word gets out that Randy talked to the police and he's branded a snitch on the streets. This results in a bad beating, and a guilty feeling Carter promises he'll take care of the problem. The police protection he makes happen however, only worsens Randy's reputation and his foster home is firebombed,
heavily injuring his foster mother and leaving him without legal guardian. Carver tries to get him adopted and even to adopt himself, but Randy is sent to a group home where his new reputation and more beatings follow him. When Carver seeks him out a year later, his friendly demeanor and smile seem forever gone and everything in his body language shows how he's hardened enormously even before his cynical responses to Carver's questions confirm this.
Of the four kids, Namond Brice seems the most destined for a life on the corner. The son of Wee-Bey, a Barksdale enforcer doing life in prison for a number of murders, and De'londa Brice, who expects him to walk in his father's footsteps. In order to maintain the life of (relative) luxury Wee-Bey used to provide for her, she orders her son to deal drugs. Namond isn't exactly cut out for that kind of life though. He works for Bodie and puts Michael in touch with Bodie, but shrinks from the violence that is involved in the drug trade. Because of his disruptive behavior in class, he is suspended from school for three days. After he returns, he is placed in the experimental, special class for disruptive kids, led by Dr. Parenti and former Major Colvin. At first uninterested, he becomes engaged in the class when allowed to voice his dreams and aspirations as “corner boy.” Despite his big talk, on the corner he fails more and more due to his being unable to stomach violence, lacking the stance and mindset Anderson describes as being elemental to survival in the streets.74 When De'Londa throws him out of her house in an attempt to harden him, Colvin steps in and after negotiating with Wee-Bey to adopt Namond in his own home, saves the boy from the
streets and the system. A year later, in season five, Namond is seen winning a debate contest in a decidedly more upscale high school.
These four children are not the only ones through whose perspective The Wire examines the failings of the school system as social institution. The aforementioned Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski starts out by suffering through some of the clichés of the ideological white middle class teacher savior type that comes to save the black inner city kids from their unwillingness to learn. He starts out naïve and inexperienced, his colleagues are cynical, is confronted by school violence when one of the girls in his class stabs another in the neck, but ultimately he manages to “get through” to the kids.
In regards to American inner city education, there exists a popular myth of the all powerful individual who just needs to rise above and ignore his or her circumstances in order to become a good student. This myth ignores the social realities the students live in as obstacles for their
learning and achieving success in school, instead emphasizing that kids should learn to adapt to the teacher and their curriculum. The Wire does not subscribe to this myth. Where the myth appeals to the power of individual to be able to do anything one sets his or her mind to in order to reach their students, Prez manages to do so by changing his teaching style and adapting his curriculum into something that is closer to the world and imagination of the kids. Because when engaged properly, some of these kids are capable of learning. One way Prez learns the difference between the
intelligence of the kids and getting them to learn his material, comes in episode eight of the fourth season.75 He is trying to get a class to solve a math problem with four multiple choice answers. A not particular attentive or gifted math student immediately knows the answer. When asked to explain, he turns out to know the right answer because of the amount of chalk marks left around each possible answer. Through smart observational and deduction skills he solved the problem, though it has nothing to do with the math of the problem. Only when Prez learns how to utilize such skills, he starts teaching real math. But he's not their shiny knight in white armor, and despite his small steps towards getting the kids to learn math in his class he doesn't save anyone. There are two reasons for this. One are the aforementioned skills, as mentioned above and as seen above in the case of Dukie and Randy. The other is the No Child Left Behind law and the associated
standardized testing. Just as Prez has found a way to engage his students in math lessons, he is forced by the school administration to teach towards the test so that the school will get better test result scores.76 And because math scores are not seen as priority by the administration, Prez even
75 Richard Price, 'Corner Boys', The Wire: the complete series (HBO, 2008).
76 The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires annual nationwide testing to determine the basic skills of students, and assign funds according to the development and/or result schools show. It also
has to teach other material, such as English. The goodwill and engagement he has slowly build up with at least part of the students throughout the year quickly dissipates at this end. He is also partly able to succeed as described above, until he isn't anymore, because Parenti's and Colvin's
experimental class selected the most disruptive students out of every class for their project.
Similarly, they start getting through to the kids once they engage them on a level that fits the world they live in and takes into account the (violent) circumstances they have to deal with on a daily basis. Likewise they fail when the project is disbanded since their unorthodox teaching methods cannot be squared with standardized testing, especially in a year that the Baltimore public school system faces a forty-five million dollar deficit. Another way the school tries to look like it's doing better than it actually is, is by social promotion. This practice promotes students to the next grade at the end of a school year, regardless of their results in their classes or if they've learned what they were supposed to, just to keep them in class with students of their own age. As a result of this policy, the homeless Sherrod who is re-enrolled by heroin addict Bubbles, his makeshift guardian on the streets, is put in a class way above anything he's able to handle. After which Sherrod quickly drops out again, to never enter a school building again.
While showing how the middle school students of West Baltimore are removed from the larger society's establishment and the school curriculum, it also shows how their school life is connected to (or rather, curtailed by) the political system, both local and national, and most of all shows how it cannot be seen isolated from their life outside of the school they attend. The inner city life of Baltimore as depicted in The Wire with its daily street violence, drug dealers recruiting young kids into their organization, stable, less stable and unstable home lives, addicted adults and more is inextricably linked to the way the kids perform in school. This perspective on inner city public education is shared by many academics. For instance, Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson of Harvard University:
The low educational achievement of poor urban youth can be traced to the social dimensions of their neighborhood context, the economic factors underlying urban decline, the institutional practices of the school system, and the reliance on mass imprisonment in the criminal justice system. This set of factors undermines the “achievement ideology” that promotes a belief in the equality of opportunity and assumes that schooling itself can provide a route for upward mobility. In this framework, education is regarded as the solution to social inequality. With an understanding of how unequal education reproduces social inequality, acceptance of the “achievement ideology” is a key mechanism through which existing inequality is legitimated. The entangled connections among these institutions are at the core of systemic, multigenerational urban inequality.77
