I'm wondering if Ishmael Reed has actually seen the show in its full context. His grudge for David Simon seems to go back to The Corner:

"He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner – it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc."

That 'etc' is a bit telling in how vague and unfounded that criticism is, really. Simon's book The Corner is an epic work of journalism; it may very well be 'about Blacks selling drugs', but it's also - Reed does not note - about a particular part of a particular city that happens to be grossly neglected and left behind due to many issues into which he probes.

None of Reed's statements about The Wire ring true at all, actually. He seems very self-absorbed, and because of that seems to miss the whole point that The Wire portrays and explores many real social issues by grounding them in socio-economic terms, which are de facto questions of class. Any line of argument that deals with race alone - Reed's seems to - is going to fall into the same holes as the liberal feminists. Frankly, they all sound like they've got chips on their shoulders. You can't isolate race or gender or sexuality or anything else without viewing them as part of a whole - all of these are complex issues, and The Wire does well to give a coherent, honest voice to them in its 60 absorbing, engrossing episodes.

I did some searching and came across UnderCoverBlackman's blog. I largely agree with this: "With the racialist critique, a white boy can't win. If he ignores the stories of the black lower class, he's rendering the black poor 'invisible'... it's benign neglect.

"If, on the other hand, he devotes his talent, intellect and passion to humanizing the black poor, without sugar-coating it... then he's a white interloper, a race profiteer."

As per Reed's argument, Simon can't win. Coming back to some of Reed's arguments - which fall flat for anyone who has actually watched the show:

"Der Sturmer – see Julius Streicher Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semite Newspaper Der Sturmer by Randall l. Bytwerk. I was shocked. Jewish men were depicted as sexual predators, raping Aryan women. They were exhibited as flashers. Both Bellow and Phillip Roth’s books include Black flashers. Jewish men especially those immigrants from Russia were depicted as criminals. Jewish children were seen as disruptive, a threat to German school children and so on. If any one looks at this stuff for example, you’ll find a perfect match for the way that David Mamet, David Simon, George Pelecanos, Stephen Spielberg and Richard Price portray Blacks. They are very critical in their projects about the way Black men treat women, yet none of them has produced a project critical of the way that men of their background treat women."

Haha, I'm thinking immediately of Jay Landsman, Bill Rawls, Mayor Carcetti; three white characters who treat women pretty awfully. Then there's Cedric Daniels, a black character who couldn't be any more in contrast to those previous three.

This isn't just tokenistic placement of self-conscious accusation-evasion on Simon and his writers' parts. I'm not speaking about Spielberg here, but Simon and co. are not "very critical in their projects about the way Black men treat women". They're critical of the way women are treated within the current system - their approach is grounded in history. Their very careful to portray these people as fallible humans born into chance situations, trying to make sense of a world already fucked up when they came into it. I can't think of anything more heartbreaking in drama than the individual narratives given to Wallace in Season One, to D'Angelo in Season Two, to Randy in Season Four, to Dukie and Michael in Season Five; or anything as sharply observant and honest in the way the show traces Bubbles's drug addiction, or Cutty's post-prison rehabilitation, or Omar's struggle to survive in a world hostile to him on both sides of the law. None of these have the power they do without the broader look at a particular part of a particular post-industrial city whose institutions are failing due to the economic foundation in place: its police department, its working class, its drug addicts, its school children, its press.

I don't think it's flawless at all, but it's certainly the most pressing thing I've ever seen - including movies too - and Ishmael Reed's criticisms are hollow chasms of contradiction.