Volume 43, Number 20 · December 19, 1996
High in the Lower Depths
By Nicholas Lemann
Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America
by Leon Dash
BasicBooks, 279 pp., $23.00
Most discussion of the black urban underclass is statistical or otherwise theoretical and removed, treating it as if it were life on an inaccessible planet. What makes Rosa Lee, Leon Dash's report on a particular Washington ghetto family, so convincing and so valuable is his intimacy with his subjects, an intimacy that very few writers about the underclass have ever achieved. Dash had to do his work in neighborhoods that are dangerous enough to daunt most experts on poverty, and he had to overcome the deep suspicion toward outsiders that members of the underclass tend to have. That he won the trust of the people in his book is a testament to his dedication and commitment—Dash has been working on this project since the beginning of 1988[1]—and, probably, to his refusal to condescend to them, to be falsely ingratiating or judgmental.
Review, 3727 words
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