The underclass, illustrated in David Simon's TV series: The Wire & Treme

Résumé du document

Poverty in the United States, and especially the notion of under class, are well represented in David Simon's TV series. First, The Wire focuses on the city of Baltimore, and studies a drug dealing organization, and the Baltimore police department trying to put an end to it. This drug dealing organization gives us an image of the African American underclass.

Then, Treme describes the reconstruction of the city of New Orleans, three months after the Hurricane Katrina of 2005. It focuses on the reconstruction of the inhabitants' life, house, and culture. Those two TV series look different: one occurs in Baltimore and the other in New Orleans, one is about a drug dealing organization and the other is about the inhabitants of New Orleans trying to rebuild their lives. But they have something in common: they both describe poverty and the underclass in the US; contrarily to all the other American TV series which spread around the world the image of a wealthy America, forgetting its 46 billions of poor people.

Extraits

[...] To conclude, New Orleans' inhabitants and drug dealers of Baltimore show us that the underclass has a strong attachment to the place where they live, simply because they do not know anywhere else. III) Solidarity: the underclass is like a family In both TV series, poor people take care of each other and they help each other. In Treme, one character does not have enough money to pay the taxi, and one of his friends pays for him. Moreover, in the first episode, someone says «New Orleans inhabitants need community». In The Wire, the drug dealers help each other. [...]

[...] To conclude, the underclass expresses a fierce opposition to any kind of official authority and official power: the federal government, the local government, the FEMA, the police . It is also linked to the hatred the underclass has towards the white elite. Their own world & their own rules The underclass described in The Wire has its own rules and it created its own world. We can understand that when a young man tells to a policeman «It's the way things go around here, officer». This sentence shows that they live differently from the other people; they have created their own rules. [...]

[...] The reasons for that are multiple. First, the characters are real-life figures. Then, the writers were inspired by their own experience (for example, the stories of The Wire were co-written by Ed Bruns who served in the Baltimore Police Department for 20 years). As the series are very realistic, they give us an image of what is the underclass: people under the poverty line, leaving outside of the American society mainstream, opposed to any form of official authority, having their own world and culture, a low level of education, solidarity, an attachment to their living place . [...]

[...] The underclass, illustrated in David Simon's TV series The Wire & Treme INTRODUCTION Poverty in the United States, and especially the notion of under class, are well represented in David Simon's TV series. First, The Wire focuses on the city of Baltimore, and studies a drug dealing organization, and the Baltimore police department trying to put an end to it. This drug dealing organization gives us an image of the African American underclass. Then, Treme describes the reconstruction of the city of New Orleans, three months after the Hurricane Katrina of 2005. [...]

[...] University of York's Head of Sociology, Roger Burrows, said that the show "makes a fantastic contribution to their understanding of contemporary urbanism", and is contrast to dry, dull, hugely expensive studies that people carry out on the same issues". Bibliography: - Gunnar Myrdal (1963), Challenge to Affluence. [...]