Any time I call my parents at night they're watching The Wire. Any time I am home and the TV is on and it's not football or basketball, it's The Wire. Despite airing in 2002, it's my parent's go-to TV show. One weekend earlier in the semester I went home and my parents were watching The Wire. The Wire is set in Baltimore, Maryland, and explores the relationship between different institutions of the city and its relationship to law enforcement each season. I don't know what season I was watching, but the episode I watched was about illegal drugs and gangs.
So this episode had two gangs fighting over turf to sell drugs on in a low-income part of Baltimore, which the cops in the show referred to as “the ghetto.” You can tell when the characters are in “the ghetto” because it’s portrayed as a very poor part of town with run down cars, chipped paint, broken windows, empty store fronts, graffiti, and litter. All of the gang members were portrayed by black actors, and the only white characters you saw in that area of town in the episode were police officers.
I made it maybe 5 minutes into the episode before I interrupted the show. I asked my parents if this show acknowledged racism, specifically systemic racism. They told me the cops were racist. I explained to them that systemic racism is when individuals are treated differently based on their race by governments, organizations, businesses, the media, education, and others. This is an example of systemic racism in the episode I watched: an old black woman was seeking the help of police to make her street a safer place to live. The police basically told her that since she lived in “the ghetto” it was hopeless, and she should just move. One of the police officers even went as far as bribing someone or calling in a favor to get the money to move the woman into an apartment in a safer part of town but she refused to leave her home. I then pointed out that this was an example of systemic racism, and that systemic racism could explain a lot of situations in the show. My parents told me to “just enjoy the show.” A few minutes after that there was a microaggression in the show and I started talking about microaggressions and how harmful they are to people’s mental and physical health. I told them what I had learned in class – that dealing with microaggressions everyday can lead to racial stress, which is a form of chronic stress, and chronic stress leads to bad behaviors and health issues. I told them about an article I read that found that being a repeated target of racial microaggressions is connected to poorer physical health. In addition, they found that one’s energy levels, emotional well-being, social functioning, and pain were also significantly negatively correlated with one’s overall experience of microaggressions (Nadal et al., 2019). At this point I could tell my parents were getting annoyed with me for interrupting the show, so I left before the episode finished.
What I’ve learned is so important for understanding people. I just wanted to teach them some of what I knew because I kept seeing things in the show that reminded me of concepts I learned about in class. When people consume media and aren’t educated about underlying reasons for an issue, it can reenforce negative stereotypes, prejudice, and implicit biases. I think it’s cool that I find things that connect with what I’ve learned outside of a school setting. The reason I can't watch The Wire is because I get frustrated with the lack of a multicultural perspective, and therefore the people I watch with get frustrated with me, and I wouldn't chose to watch The Wire by myself.
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