Because of Lorrie Moore’s boring, boring piece in the NYRB, I was thinking again about how Harvard is teaching a course on The Wire this year. Earlier this month, two of the professors who will be teaching the course made their case for why using a TV show to teach people about the inner city is a good idea. Then at The Awl, Choire objected to the idea that a fictional TV show is the best way for people to learn about actual inner cities:
So the claim is that the top-notch sociology students of America are unfamiliar with (and probably not of) the urban poor and they will learn empathy and be introduced to poor people through a made-up TV program. That seems a little broken.
It’s really obvious to me that Choire is right, and I am someone who does think that reading and watching long-form fiction can make you a better person. What the Harvard professors have wrong is the idea that fiction makes you more empathetic in this direct way where the sequence goes 1. You meet a certain kind of person on the screen (or in the text) 2. You see a real version of that kind of person in the world 3. Because of your exposure to that kind of person in the TV show, you better understand this actual person.
That’s not how it works.
I don’t see what the difference is between getting all your ideas about black people from BET and getting all your ideas about black people from The Wire. The representation of black people that shows up in The Wire is so much better than that on BET, obviously, but the consequence of both is that you walk into a place you have no idea about thinking that you understand it. So, whereas the BET fan will see a guy in a do-rag and think, “Man he probably has a gun in his belt and also loves buying platinum chains!” a fan of The Wire will see the same guy and go, “Man he probably got caught up in the drug game for a little bit, but I’m sure he wants a better life!” Neither of these encounters involve actually meeting someone you don’t know anything about.
What The Wire can actually teach you is how to be quiet and listen. The experience of watching The Wire is not the experience of living in downtown Baltimore, nor is it the experience of increasing your own empathy for any actual person who lives there. It is the experience of patiently learning how to understand fictional characters who talk in ways that are unfamiliar to you at the beginning of the show. The way this might be valuable in the actual world is that, if you ever bother to walk into someplace like downtown Baltimore, your first response will be to pay attention. That’s why the name of the show is a reference to a technology for secretly listening to other people.
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