A Problematic Scene in The Wire

A powerful but problematic scene from "The Wire" on the question of violence in Black America. Though Bunk is right in many ways about how death ripples out, regardless of the victim's background or status, his statement about how "fall we done fell" is problematic and can be easily twisted into some form of culture of poverty or black dysfunction as a product of the black urban proletariat themselves. In other words, the urban poor of Baltimore and other black communities elsewhere and the alarming homicide rates are seemingly placed solely as the responsibility of the black urban poor themselves rather than a product of the War on Drugs and structural racism. Personal responsibility is obviously huge when discussing violence and homicide, but in this context, and for primarily white audiences, it's a little unclear and potentially dangerous to hear this kind of Moynihan-esque explanations for violence among the black underclass (blaming the victim essentially). 

This kind of stuff is something I observed as a pattern in the television form of "The Boondocks," which has led me to rethink my thoughts about "The Wire," too. Though David Simon's pessimistic program is more about systemic or institutional dysfunction rather than black cultural pathology, notions and ideas from the latter do appear in the series, something picked up on by black critics, such as Ishmael Reed. In addition, it's another example of white men profiting from and being recognized as 'experts' in the field of 'urban literature' and art, even though African-Americans from Baltimore's troubled neighborhoods would be far better at telling their own story than a white guy. This ain't to say that whites can't write about black life, but my sympathy for some of Reed's critiques of the show and how blacks are exploited and used in ways that prevent them from telling their own story for mainstream ('white') America has led me to a healthy skepticism and natural resistance to a lot of the shows touted as 'realistic' depictions of black life (and yes, I know 'black life' means many things, there is no monolithic standard of 'blackness).