The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Ralph Anwan Glover from the hit show The Wire in a recent interview with Newsweek talks about his own experience on the street in a response to the murder of his youngest brother last month. Here is an excerpt from that interview:

You go in there and tell the kids that it’s not cool, but do they believe you?

Some of them do. I reach to a lot of them, through the Peaceoholics [a community group]. There’s a lot of them that get turned around, and there’s a lot of ‘em that don’t, because you got to think about it: They’re in a household where they don’t even have a dad, their mom don’t have no self esteem, no job. Their mom is walkin’ around in flipflops and a T-shirt all day, lookin’ at TV, you don’t have a dinner, you don’t have a breakfast and you’re outside. You might got a couple of rooms. You’re married to the block, you got a .38, somebody’s trying to get you some work hustling some rocks [drugs]. And you see the guys on the TV with the chains, and the guys with the fast Mercedes Benz, and you are falling into that life. And if there’s any guy in your neighborhood who is successful as a drug dealer, you look up to that guy.

Can you change that? How do you change that?

It’s been going on for so long. You have to not give up… [Some people] didn’t give up on me. They cussed me: ‘You’re a f—–’ jerk. Come on man, look at that talent you got. You want to throw that away? You want go be around men [in prison] all day when they smoking cigarettes, looking at a small TV? With somebody telling you [that] you have to get up and make your bed, you got to wipe your a– when they say wipe your a–, you got to eat when they say eat?’ I didn’t want that no more. When I was locked up for that gun charge, my son’s mom she brought my son over there to see me. I done told her don’t bring him because I didn’t want to see him from behind that glass. He put both of his hands up to the glass and he cried. Kept hittin’ the glass. She said, ‘You see? He needs you on this side. You over there.’ And I cried, and I walked out. She said you have to get your life together. I started trying to get this audition thing going on. And I went to audition for The Wire, and I been movin’ since then. And before that, I got a job at Safeway, in the deli department, then I moved up to seafood. Then I got that call, from Houston, Texas, man. She said I was on HBO. It changed my whole world. (more…)

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