The other way

Last year, the remarkable television series "The Wire" featured a scene in which Marlo Stanfield, a young man who combines entrepreneurial ambition with ruthless violence while taking over the west Baltimore drug trade, steals 50 cents' worth of candy in full view of a security guard.The security guard confronts him outside the ghetto storefront where Stanfield has committed this economically trivial but socially significant crime.The guard knows who Stanfield is, and he's enraged by the calculated act of disrespect. He says he's just an ordinary law-abiding man, working at a convenience store on a Sunday morning, trying to support a family, while making less in a month than Stanfield makes in an hour. Stanfield replies, "You want it to be one way." The guard is confused by this, so Stanfield repeats himself: "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."Part of "The Wire's" power comes from its relentless insistence that, in places like west Baltimore, things are always "the other way." In the ghetto, crime pays, honest work doesn't and people who strive to overcome the bleak circumstances into which they were born are usually crushed by a brutally unfair and deeply corrupt system.Another part of the show's force comes from its unflinching attitude toward race. Probably 90 percent of the people a viewer sees in a typical episode of "The Wire" are, like Stanfield and the security guard he humiliates, black. (West Baltimore is as segregated as a South African township in the days of apartheid.)"The Wire" is apparently Barack Obama's favorite television program, which isn't surprising. He understands as well as anyone that, when it comes to the eternal problem of race in America, there are only two views that matter.The first, which "The Wire" presents so compellingly, could be summarized like this: At bottom, the people of west Baltimore are no different from those in any other American neighborhood. "The Wire" features a mixture of smart people, dumb people, hardworking people, lazy people, courageous people, cowardly people, people with great moral integrity and people as corrupt as Jack Abramoff and Ken Lay.West Baltimore, in other words, isn't poor and crime-ridden because there's something unusual about the people who live there. "Those people" live "that way" because they're trapped in a world whose basic social, political and economic structures produce the conditions that make west Baltimore what it is.And the single most powerful aspect of that structure is a racial and economic caste system that loads the dice against poor black people at every turn, in ways that have become, ironically, both completely pervasive and largely invisible.The alternative view is that the residents of west Baltimore are trapped in a world of poverty and crime because poor black people are disproportionately lazy, stupid and immoral.Of course, as the decriers of these supposedly politically correct times love to point out, the latter view is no longer considered appropriate to voice in polite conversation. Thus those who harbor it are likely to talk a great deal about "individual responsibility," while mocking the notion that the government (meaning you and me) can do anything but make things in west Baltimore even worse.Part of the current wave of enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy no doubt comes from a sense that places like west Baltimore are the way they are because of historical injustices that this nation has still dealt with only very incompletely.Indeed, it's already being bandied about that many white people are voting for the Democratic senator from Illinois because he's black, and that voting for a black candidate proves something about themselves.Maybe it does. Maybe it helps prove they understand that, when it comes to issues like race and poverty in America, things are still the other way.(Paul F. Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Paul.Campos(at)Colorado.edu.)