Why are professors at Harvard, Duke, and Middlebury teaching courses on David Simon's The Wire? - By Drake Bennett - Slate Magazine

i thought the writer was gonna offer some sort of critique. to my surprise there was no critique at all. i have never watched the wire save an episode or two. never really understood the hype. but if it can get students engaged i suppose it's aight. my sense, though, is that the wire is soft on structural oppression, as is professor wilson. wilson's questions really come down thus:

how do we get the black deviants to act right (i.e. like middle class white people). there is really no interrogation of white middle class normativity.

sooo..

you got middle class professors teaching mostly upper middle class white students about poverty and race based on a fictional series written by a bunch of middle class white guys? im not very impressed. but maybe im missing sumthin'. GI

From Slate Magazine

This Will Be on the Midterm. You Feel Me? by Drake Bennett

Among the police officers and drug dealers and stickup men and politicians and dockworkers and human smugglers and teachers and students and junkies and lawyers and journalists who populate the late, great HBO series The Wire, there is one academic. His name is David Parenti and he teaches social work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He is not a major character, but he appears throughout the show's fourth season—an earnest, well-meaning man defined in part by his naïveté about the inner-city kids whose lives he wants to improve. As for Johns Hopkins, Baltimore's best-known university, it only comes up as a place where the show's police officers can get cushy campus security jobs after they retire. Academia, in other words, is not a culture that the show's creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, betray much interest in exploring.


Academics, on the other hand, can't seem to get enough ofThe Wire. Barely two years after the show's final episode aired—and with Simon's new show, Treme, premiering next month on HBO—there have already been academic conferences, essay anthologies, and special issues of journals dedicated to the series. Not content to write about it and discuss it among themselves, academics are starting to teach it, as well. Professors at Harvard, U.C.—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.


Read more @ Slate Magazine

tags: media, baltimore