Trash

February 15, 2024
A third of white Americans live in poverty, making them by far the largest racial representation in the lowest socioeconomic demographic. Monroe grew up poor in the Pacific Northwest, homeschooled by parents who embraced fundamentalist white Christian nationalism. After ordination as an Episcopal priest, Monroe elected to return to their community and was devastated by the number of their peers lost to violence, incarceration, and drug addiction. Their narrative is part memoir--discussing being queer, struggling through class discrimination, and experiencing childhood sexual abuse--and part insightful social commentary on the ingrained cultural and government policies that perpetuate generational poverty. Monroe alternates personal experiences with stories about their parishioners--who are a diverse group of white, POC, and Indigenous peoples--and callous acts of financial, health-care, housing, educational, and judicial prejudice. They end by advocating for collaborative, grassroots movements that empower people, give them voices, and help them prove their innate worth. Monroe speaks from experience and leads by example. Their testimony offers inside looks at an often overlooked and unfairly caricatured population.

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Starred review from January 15, 2024
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.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 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

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