“Trash – A Poor White Journey” by Cedar Monroe, 2024
This might be seen as a personal follow-up to Nancy
Isenberg’s book “White Trash,” which
was a history of working-class ‘white’ people in the U.S. Monroe writes this as a sort of
anti-capitalist memoir, as Monroe also grew up poor and ‘white’ on the
Washington state coast. It was in a
situation of abuse, shame and poverty, with an unhappy father who raised
vegetables while working in a warehouse. The family practiced a primitive ‘home
schooling’ – if such a thing is really possible - in the white nationalist
religious context of Quiverfull.
250,000 people die each year from poverty and inequality in
the U.S., the 4th highest cause of death. 66 million ‘white’ people are low-income or
poor in the U.S., out of 132 million low income or poor across most
ethnicities. A total of 10 million do
not have stable housing. These are the
stark facts behind the lower end of the U.S. class structure.
Monroe’s county in Washington State, Grays Harbor, was first
seized from native Americans by the U.S. government, privatized, then logged
over by Weyerhauser and is now one of the largest meth centers in the U.S. Monroe is gay, while some of her relatives
were not ‘white,’ which helped Monroe break from the isolated religious world
she was brought up in. Monroe flipped
her conservative Baptist upbringing by becoming an Episcopal Church deacon
after going through Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. Instead of ‘whiteness,’ Monroe also flipped
that script, ministering to working class and poor native Americans, Latinos,
European-Americans and African-Americans back in her home county. Monroe
mentors those she finds in trouble as a deacon and ‘tells their stories’ in
this book. But Monroe has still not lost
an identification with ‘whiteness’ as a main theoretical axis.
Monroe’s time at the university in Massachusetts showed
that middle-class liberal European-Americans looked down on working-class
‘whites’ as stupid, dangerous and lost. Monroe only found kinship among
African-American professors who understood the class ramifications of being
working-class in a bourgeois context.
Monroe understands that classism is key to the oppressive narratives of
capital, easily denigrating ‘rednecks,’ ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’ as
inferiors, something done by both main bourgeois parties. This strategy is used to demonstrate the
personal failures of poor ‘whites’ and to separate them from their class brethren. Note: *I use ‘white’ not as a real descriptor, but
as an easy identifier. Monroe believes
there are separate races when there is only one – the human one. Skin color and
physical features are not ‘races,’ no matter what racists or liberals say.
The
Locals
Monroe discusses potlach and communal traditions of the
local indigenous tribes, among them the Quinault, where private property is not
sacred. 40% of the reservation is now in tribal hands, when before it was in
the single digits. Many of the poor in Aberdeen, the biggest town in the
county, are indigenous. Local tribes, with few resources, do more social
service work than the County government, while also protecting salmon and
preparing for sea-level rise. It seems native
Americans are one of the few organized grown-ups in the county. Monroe describes the homeless encampments
along the Chehalis River in Aberdeen, which have their share of addicts, sex
workers and the mentally unstable, but also its own women leaders and creative
types. The city regularly bulldozes or destroys their
living structures, while the local poor do what they can to survive.
Monroe mentions that one out of 15 kids in the county are
taken by family services and put into foster care or adoption, due to problems
with a parent like addiction. The poor in
this county lose their children on a regular basis to this racialized process. Then there is youth incarceration, which is
high in Washington State. The schools can
commit children to juvenile court; parents use physical violence on their
children; the juvenile jail puts kids in solitary for long periods of time; the
judge in court is cruel. What does this
all do to future adults? Nothing
good.
Monroe recounts incidents of widespread police violence
against homeless, minority and poor people, some of whom have parole violation warrants.
Monroe notes that some hard-up light-skins, including some in Monroe’s family, joined
the police or prison guards and end up disciplining darker-skinned poor
people. Monroe spends a lot of time visiting jails and
prisons to tell their stories, especially local indigenous people locked up on
a regular basis. White supremacist
prison gangs like the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Klan organize inside prisons
trying to get all ‘Caucasians’ to join for protection. She notes that some Latino prison gangs
accept whites now, so that is not the only route anymore.
Early death through suicide, medical neglect, violence, disease,
alcoholism, exposure and overdoses are the wages of poverty in Grays Harbor County,
which is mostly white. Monroe tattoos
the names of the dead on her body like a ‘holy rosary,’ while spending much
time at hospitals attending to contacts and friends. Hospitals are underfunded, under-staffed and
difficult to reach without good transport.
Funerals are frequent and Monroe is involved in many as a chaplain.
 |
| Aberdeen, WA homeless encampment |
POLITICS
So on to politics: Monroe
posits that white supremacy materially hurts ‘white’ people too, inhibits
working-class unity, allows the rich to run everything while poisoning its believers. Monroe has a basic understanding of capital
through private property in land and its source in labor and nature
exploitation, resulting in commodification of everything. This extends to the role of the state, the
police and the laws which protect Weyerhauser’s private land, a firm that still
owns 40% of Grays Harbor County. Fell
one tree on their holdings and you have committed a crime, much like ye olde
English peasant who snares a rabbit for dinner on his laird’s immense estate. Nothing has changed in that respect,
especially for the homeless. Monroe
reports on a legal struggle with the city of Aberdeen to protect the land along
the River for squatters, which resulted in some land near city hall set aside
while shelters along the river were bulldozed again.
Local whites came out to terrorize the homeless and their
allies like Monroe in some of these confrontations.
Monroe’s solutions other than holy oil? Very little of what she talks about involves
‘white’ people working. Monroe centers
the book around the homeless, and while it is well known that many homeless
work, this is not shown. This book is about the ‘poor,’ a concept that is fuzzy
about economic roles, but the implication is that they don’t work except
selling drugs or in petty theft. Monroe describes
little political action involving these folks, as most are too busy trying to
survive. Monroe draws ire advocating for
clean needles and Naloxone with the local city council and health authorities,
but it seems to be a lonely fight.
Monroe advocates a new Rainbow Coalition, the present Poor
People’s Campaign led by Reverend William Barber and the Young Patriot Party of
yore. The PPC talks about ‘low wage workers’ not just poor people. Monroe thinks it might take another 500 years
“to fully end this system” so it
seems progress is not really forthcoming anytime soon. Monroe’s church opened a community center
centered on ‘lunch, pastoral care and
occasional events,’ pursuing ‘education
and narrative building.’ Monroe’s
church also opened shelters in church parking lots, then inside a church after
vigilante threats were made against them and the homeless. Monroe began to carry a loaded gun for
protection.
Most of Monroe’s activism is social work and charity. One march in town was held, and was opposed
by threats. 3 acres of land were rented
to form a CSA to provide vegetables to the hungry, and was later bought by the
diocese as a permanent farm. Monroe
titles a chapter “Healing is
Revolutionary” which works as a feel-good narrative but it doesn’t really
undermine the system at its root. Liberation theology has to be taken to its
logical conclusion to actually achieve liberation. Monroe and the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia’s
work could be an adjunct to mass class struggle at some point, but now it salves
the multiple wounds of capital.
Monroe’s work linked up with several local indigenous Nations,
which is a huge plus. A true mass movement
will link tribes, unions, labor, left parties, community rights
and single-issue groups in a united front against capital, on a national and
even international scale. Monroe would
not oppose this, as she supports alliances of some kind. Without that unity poverty will continue. Certainly the concept of an anti-capitalist
united front is still far off. Is it a
daunting task which may be beyond the ability of the working classes and
anti-capitalist Left in the present moment?
I have seen some begin to turn towards this concept given the
reactionary assault by Trump forces, but it is slow going, as liberalism and socialism
do not mix in the end.
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search
box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “poverty,”
‘poor,’ ‘white trash.’
And I got the book at the library! May Day has many books on poverty,
homelessness and the like.
Red Frog / April 27, 2025
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