Teaching the “audacity of despair”

The Wire has become the subject of a wide variety of college courses, as I noted back in May. Now it can be found at the top of academic food chain.

Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson explain how they’re using The Wire in their course on urban inequality at Harvard this semester. Clearly, they get a lot of what is going in the show.

More than simply telling a gripping story, “The Wire” shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, imprisonment, and how the situation feeds on itself. . .

A core theme of “The Wire” is that various institutions work together to limit opportunities for the urban poor. . .

Through its scrupulous exploration of drug-dealing gangs, the police, politicians, unions, public schools and the print media, viewers see that an individual’s decisions and behavior are often shaped by — and indeed limited by — forces beyond his or her control. . .

“The Wire” is fiction, but it forces us to confront social realities more effectively than any other media production in the era of so-called reality TV. It does not tie things up neatly; as in real life, the problems remain unsolved, and the cycle repeats itself as disadvantages become more deeply entrenched.

But The Wire is not just about the urban poor and how they make decisions in circumstances that are not of their own choosing. It’s a larger, more general indictment of the United States and of the forces of capitalism that have played themselves out across U.S. society over the past few decades. It’s about the poor in the inner-city but it’s also about the non-poor, both onscreen (in the police force, unions, politics, schools, and newspapers) and off (in the specter of capital). They’re all making decisions in circumstance not of their own choosing. They are all makers of history and its victims, albeit not in the same way.

That, for me, is the real lesson of The Wire.