All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

If you recall in that episode, after his death, you cut to the newsroom, and the paper comes across somebody’s desk, and they look at it and they throw it in the basket. Outside of his world, he’s nothing to anybody. In what we think of us as the proper society, and even in the newsroom, he’s nothing. “Throw him in the basket. Put him with all the other guys.” It’s like in DC, in The Washington Post, they change the name of it quite frequently. It’s been called “Around the Region” and “Crime,” but buried in the Metro section are the murders of blacks in the city, and they get a paragraph or maybe two paragraphs, if they’re lucky. But if a white person is killed on the other side of town, it makes the front page. What that does is subconsciously, it puts in the mind of people reading the newspaper, especially young people, is that black lives don’t in fact matter. That was our way of saying Omar wasn’t that big of a deal outside of his hood and the underworld that he ran with.