Trash A poor white journey

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.

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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.