Trash: A Poor White Journey

Cedar Monroe

Mar 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Janet Metzger

Audiobook

8 hr 40 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

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. 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.

About the author

Cedar Monroe has worked for over a decade as an activist and interfaith chaplain to people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and addiction. 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.

AudioFile Earphones Award winner Janet Metzger brings the experience of nearly four decades of theater, film, and television acting to her work as an audiobook narrator. Janet is also an award-winning documentary narrator and a master teacher at Emory University School of Law.

Liz Theoharis is cochair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, alongside Bishop William J. Barber II, and she is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary. She is the author of Always with Us? and coauthor of Revive Us Again.

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