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

Extraits de l'étude de cas

[...] 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. [...]

[...] They also have a specific way to dress: they wear large pants, large jackets, and very often a bobble hat. The economist Gunner Myrdal confirms this idea: he says that the underclass is a part of the population which is excluded from the mainstream of American society, and that those people created their own rules in their own world. VI) A specific language Their language also distinguishes the underclass in The Wire because they use AAVE (African American Vernacular English). [...]

[...] He blames him for having run away when the hurricane came. There is also a fierce opposition to both federal and local government: an inhabitant of New Orleans is interviewed by a reporter, and he holds both federal and local government responsible for the flood after Hurricane Katrina. He says that «the flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe» and federal fuck up». He explains that the flood protection system built by the army corp. of engineers - also known as the federal government - failed. [...]

[...] Moreover, when the teacher asks them where they see them in the future, many of them answer «dead». In another sequence, the character of D'Angelo explains that having ideas does not get you paid. He means that you need to have money to survive, and that being a genius is not enough. He is in a way legitimizing their activity of drug dealing. That is the idea of James D.Wright and Joel A.Devine in The Greatest of Evils: Urban Poverty and the American Underclass. [...]