Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America

Mr. Dashs treatment of Rosa Lees life course achieves a highly deserving goal by apparently paradoxical means: it exposes the traps of initial and subsequent living conditions by showing an individual's life shaped by it's decisions and choices. He never allows the reader to wallow in simple compassion or anger, and he never resorts to the true but useless explanation that the system is responsible for Rosa Lees miserable life. He always keeps your mind active and attentive.A good example is his report on Rosa Lees trial for shoplifting: while the defence insists that Rosa Lee might be a thief but is a very unfortunate woman and had to steal in order to support her family and her addiction, Dash points out that Rosa Lee has been shoplifting already in her early childhood while none of her siblings did shoplift. This suggest that her behavior might have had a functionality within her relationship with her mother, not only in her relationship with the system. By never letting individual dynamics and decisions, however constraining their contexts and however dismal their consequences, be covered up by the overwhelming explanatory power of economic deprivation, he manages to show in a touching and revealing way how a person's place within a system translates into his or her behavior and behavior outcomes. Especially by never denying the individual Rosa Lee or any of her children their agency in shaping their lives, by never reducing them to inevitable victims unfortunate-but-now-beyond-redemption, by describing extensively how two of teh children escaped addiction and poverty, he exposes the systems' crushing cruelty.

As someone who studies poverty and race relations, as well as the devastating effect of drugs on urban America, I found this book to be just enthralling. I could not put it down once I started, and although I found myself shocked at many of the things I discovered about this mother and her relationship with her children, I felt a bond with them. In the end it was hard to be disgusted, just saddened by what had happened to Rosa Lee and her family. Leon Dash did a fantastic job with this story.

The subject is depressing, but the research and writing are superb. ROSA LEE is a lengthy and well-chronicled look into the daily lives of one multi-generational family in an environment of poverty and drug-infestation, where routine crime and imprisonment are accepted as normal, and where escape is possible, but extremely rare. I'd recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the mentality and hopelessness of drug addition. This story couldn't have been written any clearer than Leon Dash did in ROSA LEE.

Leon Dash outdid himself on this writing. As an educator within the school system I have seen these families and the devastating affects that drugs and crime have on their lives. Dash cuts Rosa Lee no slack in telling her story, he does not seek to excuse her behavior by blaming a racist and oppressive society, nor does he condemn her for the hiddeous behavior she exhibits and has exhibited over the years. He simply tells her story with the bone chilling truth that must be told. The underclass in America has not just begun it has been hundreds of years in the making and Dash allows his readers to understand not only the past forces that helped create this class but the current forces as well. This is a powerful writing and should be required reading for every Urban Planning, Social Work, and Sociology major in this country. Excellent writing, five stars does not begin to give this book what it deserves.

In recent years, welfare and the underclass have become a prominent part of the national conversation. But pundits' portrayals of the urban poor are often distressingly simplistic, usually presenting the underclass as a mass of indistinguishable brown and black people inhabiting a murky, foreign land. In 1988, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash began a seven-year project that he hoped might dispel reductionist thinking, trying to make this unfamiliar world complex and real by focusing on a single case, one that shows many of the facets of underclass life. He tells the story of a single Washington, D.C., woman and her family-four generations of poverty, pathology and crippling dysfunction. Rosa Lee Cunningham "is fifty-two years old, a longtime heroin addict, with a long record of arrests for everything from petty theft to drug trafficking," Dash writes. "Her eight children-the oldest of whom she bore at age fourteen-were fathered by six different men, and six of the children have followed her into a life of teenage parenthood, drugs, and crime." Rosa Lee's story is hardly inspirational-and yet in it there are glimmers of brightness. Amid the sadness and squalor, Dash leaves room for hope."Rosa Lee" grew out of a controversial Washington Post newspaper series that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994; about half the book is fresh material. Dash paints detailed portraits of Rosa Lee and her children; presented nonjudgmentally, his depictions are founded on ambiguity. He makes it clear that-in the name of "survival"-she condemned at least two succeeding generations to follow her example, alienated from broader, productive society. "Rosa Lee exposed all of her children to her criminal lifestyle, the underworld path she argues was her avenue to survival," he writes, "and four of her six sons followed her onto the same path, with ruinous outcomes for each of them." One chilling example: Early in the book, Rosa Lee describes a shoplifting trip with an 11-year-old grandson and how a 5-year-old granddaughter had once helped her sell heroin. "Rosa Lee has introduced her granddaughter to the drug trade," Dash writes, "as something to do to earn enough money to eat." Despite her behavior and legacy, though, Rosa Lee remains somehow likable and sympathetic throughout the book. "I can't help but think that if circumstances had been different, if she hadn't faced so many obstacles in her life, her drive and her charisma might have caused her to create a different life for herself, her children, and grandchildren," Dash writes.Facing poverty, dysfunction and ruined lives, Americans weaned on tabloid TV tend to look to assign quick blame. Who's at fault for Rosa Lee and her children? "There is something in her life story to confirm any political viewpoint," Dash writes. "Some may see her as a victim of hopeless circumstances, a woman born to a life of deprivation because of America's long history of discrimination and racism. Others may give her the benefit of the doubt