All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

It’s not that the characters are white. It’s that the characters were at the point of importation of the drugs and the death of the working class. The union that you’re going to see under pressure is going to be multiracial. There’s going to be black stevedores. But it is important that it have a white presence, because the last thing I want to do is suggest that you can track the drug problem through America by following black people. That’s a very reductive thing that I’m not going to say. I’m going to say you can track the drug problem into America by following class, and that, in a very fundamental way, the working class, white and black, is being devoured, and the underclass is growing because of the industrialization. I said, “If we don’t suggest that the morality is permeable to all races at this point, we’re saying some ugly shit that I don’t believe in and we have no right to say.”