With compelling and painful clarity, Leon Dash peels back layer upon layer of false images and beliefs about the human beings who are most likely to become America's addicts, prostitutes, and "street" crimnals. Rosa Lee's story serves as a reminder that there are more components to generational dysfunction than merely bad decisions.Īny one interested in understanding the complex nature and dynamics of crime and drug abuse should read this real-life report. You can't expect people who never knew better to do better. What makes the story so pathetic also makes it so sad, because they really had no chance. After reading "Rosa Lee." I found myself feeling sorry for them, as they were quite aware that they made horrible choices but had no way to fix them. Only two out of the eight children became productive citizens, as they had supportive adults guiding them while growing up. Many had their own kids before 15 years of age, who also fell into the same traps as their parents. Six of her kids are illiterate, drug-addicted criminals. She pimped out her 11-year old daughter and turned tricks with her. She is a long-time heroin addict who gets high with her kids. "Rosa Lee." leaves readers feeling contemptuous, disgusted, and uneasy. Rosa Lee's family didn't find the warmth of other suns they were entrapped in a system they were expected to fall into, one that was designed just for them, and one that left no chance of escaping it. Instead of finding a reprieve from their struggles, they found themselves in an urbanized blight that consumed them for generations. Rosa Lee's story began in 1932 when her parents and grandparents left the world of sharecropping and moved to Washington, DC. Where there's a barrio, ghetto, trailer park, or any other severely economically depressed area there's a Rosa Lee Cunningham. I read Leon Dash's "Rosa Lee: A Generational Tale Of Poverty And Survival In Urban America" many years, and I found it to be an engrossing story that explains generational poverty, trauma, and epitomizes what happens when people are relegated to the permanent underclass. He also shows how some people-including two of Rosa Lee's children-have made it out of the ghetto, breaking the cycle to lead stable middle-class lives in the mainstream of American society. Yet for all of America's efforts, Rosa Lee and millions like her remain trapped in a cycle of poverty characterized by illiteracy, teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violent crime.Dash brings us into her life and the lives of her family members offering a human drama that statistics can only refer to. Rosa Lee's life story spans a half century of hardship in the slums and housing projects of Southeast Washington, a stone's throw from the marble halls and civic monuments of the world's most prosperous nation. Kennedy Journalism Award.For four years Leon Dash of the Washington Post followed the lives of Rosa Lee Cunningham, her children, and five of her grandchildren, in an effort to understand the persistence of poverty and pathology within America's black underclass. A transcendent piece of writing, it won the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. The much-hyped ‘Smart Cities’ promise to digitise the urban merging of these two infrastructural layers.Based on a heart-rending and much discussed series in the Washington Post, this is the story of one woman and her family living in the projects in Washington, D.C. Similarly, the internet is also a material infrastructure, although it is often portrayed as immaterial. Modern cities depend largely on invisible infrastructures that usually only become noticeable when they cease functioning. MATERIALS TO PREPARE FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE LECTURE (PDF, 447 kB)Īlready more than half of the world’s population lives in cities – and this number is growing.Live at Goethe-Institut, Hanoi and at Deutsches Haus, Ho Chi Minh City
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