Trash: A Poor White Journey

by Cedar Monroe, Liz Theoharis (Foreword by)

Overview

Human beings are not trash, and the system that enables humans to imagine each other as such needs to end.

Every day across the US, 66 million poor white people pay the price for failing whiteness. In this sweeping debut, activist and chaplain Cedar Monroe writes indelibly about and for poor white people: about unlearning the American dream, untangling from white supremacy, and working for liberation alongside other poor folks.

Monroe introduces us to people who are poor and unhoused in a small town in Washington, who eke out a living on land that once provided timber for the nation. On the banks of the Chehalis River, we meet residents of the largest homeless encampment in the country, who face sweeps and evictions and are targeted by vigilantes before bringing their case to federal court. We watch a community grapple with desperation, government neglect, and its own racism. From visits to jails, flophouses, tent cities, and on trips to hospitals and funeral homes, we see leaders forging connections between their people and the global movement to end poverty.

With trenchant insight born of liberation theology, radical politics, and an even more radical hope, Monroe introduces us to people hammering out survival strategies and hope in the abandoned zones of empire. Capitalism and colonialism have stolen land from Indigenous people, forced workers into dangerous jobs, and then left them to die when their labor was no longer needed. But what would happen if poor white folks rejected the empty promises of white supremacy and embraced solidarity with other poor people? What if they joined the resistance to the system that is, slowly or quickly, killing us all? Trash asks us to see anew the peril in which poor white people live and the choices we all must make.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506486277
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	235
Sales rank:	356,343
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Cedar Monroe has worked for over a decade as an activist and interfaith chaplain to people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and addiction. Raised in a poor white rural community, Monroe has focused their work on understanding those communities, combating the effects of white nationalism, and cross-racial organizing for change. Monroe has an MDiv from Episcopal Divinity School and has been an Episcopal Church Foundation fellow. Monroe has been featured in several documentaries, including We Cried Power and America Will Be, and in articles in the Associated Press and the Seattle Times. They live with their wife in the Pacific Northwest.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is a theologian, pastor, author, and anti-poverty activist. She is the executive director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for thirty years. Her books include We Cry Justice, We Pray Freedom and Always with Us?, and she has been published in the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, Sojourners, and elsewhere. Rev. Dr. Theoharis is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary. She and her family live in New York City.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I: ORIGINS

CHAPTER 1: CANARIES IN A COAL MINE

CHAPTER 2: POOR WHITE TRASH

CHAPTER 3: THE FAMILY CURSE

CHAPTER 4: NAMING MY STORY

CHAPTER 5: CLASS WAR IN GRADUATE SCHOOL

CHAPTER 6: THE BEGINNING

PART II: SURVIVAL

CHAPTER 7: THE RIVER

CHAPTER 8: "THE AMERICAN DREAM" AND ITS SIGNS

CHAPTER 9: BAPTISM ON THE EDGE OF LOSS

CHAPTER 10: CHILDHOOD NIGHTMARES

CHAPTER 11: THE THEATRICS OF TERROR

CHAPTER 12: ON THE RUN

CHAPTER 13: THE VALUE OF PUNISHMENT

PART III: DEATH

CHAPTER 14: DEATH ON THE RIVER

CHAPTER 15: SHAKER FUNERAL

CHAPTER 16: HOSPITAL VISITS

CHAPTER 17: KNEELING IN CHAINS

CHAPTER 18: SEEKING REDEMPTION

PART IV: RESISTANCE 

CHAPTER 19: A RAINBOW COALITION

CHAPTER 20: A POOR PEOPLE'S CAMPAIGN, THEN AND NOW

CHAPTER 21: FACING OFF WITH VIGILANTES

CHAPTER 22: PROJECTS OF SURVIVAL, ABERDEEN STYLE

CHAPTER 23: RAISING THE FLAG

CHAPTER 24: HEALING IS REVOLUTIONARY

CHAPTER 25: MUSTARD SEED MOVEMENT

CHAPTER 26: AN ODE TO JOY

PART V: BUILDING

CHAPTER 27: ANNIVERSARY OF THE BLACK PANTHERS

CHAPTER 28: WHITE TRASH IN D.C.

CHAPTER 29: THE HALLS OF CONGRESS

CHAPTER 30: TRESPASS FIRST DEGREE

CHAPTER 31: #RIVERGANG4LIFE

CHAPTER 32: THE UPRISING MEETS ABERDEEN

CHAPTER 33: ORGANIZING THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 34: WHEN WE BOUGHT THE FARM

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

Editorial Reviews

"Joining the ranks of Barbara Ehrenreich and Nancy Isenberg, interfaith chaplain Monroe recounts forgotten people dismissed and made invisible, tucked away in trailer parks and housing projects around the land.... An eloquent defense of the poor and dispossessed in America." —Kirkus Reviews

"Monroe speaks from experience and leads by example. Their testimony offers inside looks at an often overlooked and unfairly caricatured population." —Booklist

"Interfaith chaplain Cedar Monroe's Trash is a case study in the US's rampant poverty problem....delivered with delivered with eloquence, intensity, and urgency throughout." —Foreword Reviews

"A poignant glimpse into the lives and obstacles in an impoverished postindustrial county. Includes a call to action to unite and empathize with others." —Library Journal

"Here is a voice not often heard in our difficult but necessary conversations about justice and inclusion. Cedar Monroe reveals another layer of complexity in the quest for Beloved Community with this provocative study of poor white people in America, and the forces that seek to prevent them from claiming solidarity across racial lines with others who are poor." —The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church and author of Love Is the Way and Songs My Grandma Sang

"Calling strongly, faithfully, clearly, and with tremendous heart for all poor and oppressed people to come together to demand change, Monroe insists that it is only when we reach across barriers of race and culture that we will come to realize the fullness of our power. This is an important, maybe even an essential book. Everyone should read it." —Rev. Cristina Rathbone, author of A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars  

"Through the stories and lives of poor and dispossessed people encamped along the Chehalis River, Trash is an intimate portrayal of what it really means to be poor and white in this country. Monroe carries the unbearable loss of this community, beautifully and carefully. Yet Trash is not an appeal to pity or charity. Rather, it is a call to build organization and leadership in these forgotten places, among poor white communities. Given the threats of an emboldened white Christian nationalist movement to our democracy and fundamental rights, Monroe's call is a political necessity for our times." —Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director for the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and the Poor People's Campaign

"This deeply moving book blends memoir, history, and a razor-sharp analysis of the havoc that capitalism and white supremacy have wreaked on the natural world and Indigenous, Black, brown, and poor white communities. Through remarkable storytelling, Cedar Monroe recounts what resistance, organizing, and solidarity look like in the margins of empire, and beckons us to learn from past movements, our elders, and the leadership of the disinherited. This book is a must-read." —Lindsey Krinks, author of Praying with Our Feet 

"With raw energy and honesty, Cedar Monroe offers an insider's view of the culture and struggles of America's poor working class and bears witness to their search for hope, home, and dignity amid violence, drugs, eviction, and death. This is a must-read to understand the human sacrifice of the American empire." —Dr. Kwok Pui Lan, Dean's Professor of Systematic Theology, Candler School of Theology, Emory University

From the Publisher

01/26/2024

In their debut book, activist and interfaith chaplain Monroe returns as an Episcopal priest to the place where they were raised. Grays Harbor County, an area of great beauty along the Washington coastline, is also a place of extreme poverty, the result of the waning of the timber industry over the last 40 years. Monroe empathizes with the impoverished people of their county because they too came from a low-income earning family whom many called "white trash." They spent a decade in Grays Harbor, ministering to unhoused people and imprisoned people. Chaplains on the Harbor, Monroe's nonprofit, also set up a farm where people can learn the farming business. Their book is the story of the people the ministry helped and an analysis of why there is poverty in this wealthy country. They examine the theft of land from Indigenous peoples, the empire-building usurpation of natural resources, the exploitation of people living in impoverished conditions, and the ideology that turns poor people of different races against each other, benefitting only capitalists and white supremacists. Finally, the book discusses ways to fight for better conditions for all people. VERDICT A poignant glimpse into the lives and obstacles in an impoverished postindustrial county. Includes a call to action to unite and empathize with others.—Caren Nichter

Library Journal

2023-12-14
An eloquent defense of the poor and dispossessed in America.

Joining the ranks of Barbara Ehrenreich and Nancy Isenberg, interfaith chaplain Monroe recounts forgotten people dismissed and made invisible, tucked away in trailer parks and housing projects around the land. Raised in financial precarity, the author writes that the cohort of 66 million poor white people in the U.S. are reviled as “white trash, rednecks, poor whites, or crackers,” adding, “My wife calls us broke-ass white people.” Their world is well represented by the Washington town in which Monroe lives, where “jobs dried up and prisons fill up” and where deaths of despair—to suicide, alcoholism, opioid overdose, and so forth—are so common as to barely merit mention. At the same time, there is the constant threat of being one missed paycheck away from defaulting on the rent or mortgage. Ironically, Monroe adds, much of the lot of poor white people has long been that of Indigenous peoples: dispossession, alienation, police violence, lack of educational opportunity and health care, and a host of other indignities. A natural alliance should therefore exist among people who would benefit from the strength in numbers that might result. “Over the past century,” Monroe writes, “Black and brown people have borne a large part of the burden of work and energy to resist racialized capitalism. Perhaps now is the moment that poor white people can join them and replicate the Rainbow Coalition on a larger scale.” One tenet in the author’s well-considered platform is that poor people themselves need to take the lead in breaking the chains of poverty: “We must dare to dream of a better future and an end to this five-hundred-year experiment in death and destruction.”

A powerful statement against predatory capitalism and its millions of victims.

Kirkus Reviews