Race, Poverty, and Narco-capitalism on The Wire: A Political-Economic Analysis

This chapter will critically examine how poverty and race function in tandem within the narrative world of HBO's award-winning series The Wire (Simon et al., 1999–2007). I will analyze the series across its five seasons, with a special focus on the series' interpretation of poverty, race, and narcocapitalism within the upwardly mobile economic aspirations of many of its characters, its impoverished geographic setting, and the drug distribution and consumption landscape of Baltimore. The Wire's setting also offers viewers an interpretation of a contemporary urban metropolis populated with African American and Latinx citizens who occupy the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, while city politicians, judicial officers, and businessmen occupy the highest echelons of that hierarchy. Using textual and discourse analysis, I critically analyze the messages the series offers to its audience in keeping with an intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991) theoretical framework. To accomplish this intersectional analysis, I explicitly eschew attempts to eradicate identity categories we colloquially refer to as "race" and socioeconomic "class" and instead use them to draw linkages between these two concepts in tandem with a theory of poverty because understanding the complexities between these connections "can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction" (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). This is especially true when one considers the factual parallels between racial underrepresentation and impoverished socioeconomic standing within the United States. Thus, adopting this framework can illuminate how messages in mass media can shed light on convenient one-dimensional construction of the human experience that is "often shaped by other dimensions of their identities" outside of the conventional Hollywood formula.