TV REVIEWS : ‘Confessions’ a Saga of Urban Despair

Before the one-hour “Frontline” report “The Confessions of RosaLee” is over, there is no avoiding the thought that America’s current welfare system has a cancerous effect on some people. Some people like RosaLee Cunningham.

Triggered by Washington Post reporter Leon Dash’s controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning series profiling Cunningham and her horrible life in the underclass, “Confessions” seeks to probe further into this woman’s past and thinking.

What could have brought this 59-year-old woman to start stealing at 8, have babies at 13, turn prostitute at 14, have seven more babies by 21, and sink into a cycle of prison and drugs? Why, for instance, did Cunningham succumb to total degradation when her brothers and sisters lifted themselves out of poverty and into the middle class?

Neither Dash nor producer June Cross can fully answer these questions, but then, neither can Cunningham. Born into desperate poverty in the shadow of the Capitol Dome, she was one of her mother’s 22 babies, 11 of whom survived. She tells of wanting to “learn numbers” in school, but finally resisting any learning, including ever learning how to read. She confesses to developing life skills in theft and making a quick buck while living on welfare from an early age--even if the money came from prodding one of her own daughters into prostitution.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, Cunningham’s heroin habit spread to her children, and the family’s sharing of dirty needles made many of them HIV-positive. One of her sons has already died of complications of AIDS, and Cunningham has a full-blown condition. And now, her children’s children are in prison, or being shot on the D.C. streets.

Many readers of Dash’s original series saw this woman as committing maternal murder. Some viewed the story as reinforcing the worst stereotypes of poor African Americans. Dash responds that Cunningham behaves like many in the underclass of all colors, and that 57% of the underclass is black.

In fact, Cunningham is easily used to serve any relevant agenda, whether it’s left-wing welfare reform or right-wing welfare abolition. She is American welfare’s haunting ghost, society’s worst nightmare come true.

* “The Confessions of RosaLee” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.