Trash: A Poor White Journey
Ebook
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 county, 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.
- Title: Trash: A Poor White Journey
- Authors: Liz Theoharis, Cedar Monroe
- Publisher: Broadleaf Books
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781506486284, 1506486282
- Resource ID: LLS:9781506486284
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-06-06T02:12:35Z
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, You Only Get What You're Organized to Take, 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 co-pastor of the Freedom Church of the Poor, and teaches at educational institutions across the country, including Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Episcopal Divinity School, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and more.