On saying the right thing versus the ‘duty’ of work

re. ‘racism’ in David Simon’s 1991 book about Baltimore’s homicide unit

The Wire creator David Simon’s first book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets opens up to us not just the daily workings of an American homicide unit, but also a valuable insight into racial realities in the 1980s that seem little changed today.

In an afterword written in 2006, after The Wire spurred a new edition, Simon says,

There are pages of the book on which these men appear to be racist or racially insensitive, sexist or homophobic, where their humour derives from the poverty and tragedy of others. And yet with a body on the ground – black, brown, or, on rare occasion, white – they did their job regardless. In this graceless age of ours, any sense of duty is remarkable enough to excuse any number of lesser sins. And so readers learned to forgive, just as the writer learned to forgive, and six hundred pages later the very candour of the detectives was a quality, rather than an embarrassment.

This talk of a ‘sense of duty’ excusing what ‘appear to be’ racist, sexist and homophobic comments seems remarkable now given our zero-tolerance environment for anything that anyone – of the right groups, not the wrong ones – might be offended about.