Was it a real portrayal?

I don't think there is a single, simplistic way that "blacks" are portrayed in this show. Is Omar portrayed the same way as Lester Freamon? Or Prop Joe and Carver, or even Avon and Stringer?

These are the only words I have, I'm stuck with them, stuck in them

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It's not the fact that they are black that is causing the characters to behave this way, it's that they aren't given any opportunities due to the living conditions they have been born into. This is pretty thoroughly explored in Season 4 by looking at the school system and parents the children live with.

So much for blacks and their blues, jazz, and rock and roll and comedic talent that virtually the entire world enjoys. if civility is built by the merits of creativity then blacks hold as much limitations as whites or Asians.

animals, you call them. I consider them untamed beasts of a failed culture and state. even the term 'black culture' is already vague and ethnically myopic.

Show me a single American city where poor white people live the same way.

It seems as though you're referring specifically to the black drug dealers; the people who've opted - or drifted, or felt forced - into that life. As their occupation is filled with "tension," it makes sense to me that their presenting themselves as tough, in-your-face, and even ruthless, is necessary for success and even survival in their world.

I'm a few episodes into S3, myself, and just watched a scene set in a community meeting, at which people living in the same neighborhoods complain angrily to the police about wanting the dealers gone. These people are black, too, but we see few of them as the storyline (at least in S1 and S3) focuses on policing not the poor black community as a whole, but a subset of it.

Everyone likes to say how real the wire is, but it is still a fictional show where many things were done for dramatic effect and half was made up. Also, it's a very ideological show-it's essayistic in its approach. Thus Marlo is more of an idea than a character- the idea being that taking out one leader leads to instant replacement, possibly with someone worse. Nothing on the show was "real" it was all drama, with realistic details, but it was ALL still fiction. The concept, ideas have truth to them, but you could make the same show focusing on different theses, for example, the amount of mental illness in schools and ptsd in the hood, property tax as tuition, teacher burnout, rather than "corner kids vs normal kids"- which serves the thesis of the show- Not reality- thus drug trade dictates the school problems and most teachers are good stuck in a bad system. I worked in inner city schools for years, and it's not like on the wire, but the schools in the show serve a very good thesis, about the nature of bureaucracy, which has an air of truth to it, but in no way are you watching a hidden camera show.

And as for your other point, yes, this does portray black life and urban culture as incredibly dark and depressing. I doubt BLM would be ok with it today. I lived in a poor black area when i first watched it and was almost like holy *beep* is this really going on? But it's not in the everyday sense, and is in the macro sense. But all my friends in the area, even kids involved in the drug trade had pretty humdrum lives most of the time, until the rare day they didn't- that day-amplified for drama, would be on The Wire.