Episcopal Divinity School alum Cedar Monroe ’13 released their first book, Trash: A Poor White Journey in March 2024. EDS Director of Strategy & Operations Miguel Escobar spoke with Monroe about the book, their time at EDS, and their work to expose injustice and organize for a better world.
This is an incredible book, a personal meditation on whiteness and poverty. What led you to write this book? What inspired you to set pen to paper?
I wrote the book for a few reasons. First, I wish that I had a book about the communities I came from—majority white, poor, and post-industrial— when I went to college and seminary. While Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance was widely touted as that book, when I read it, it was just another book that blamed poor people for their poverty, stereotyping them as backwards, ignorant, and lazy. I wanted a book that instead exposed the systems of capitalism and colonialism that have made 43.5% of Americans poor and low income. I wanted people to see the incredible violence of that system as it is meted out to poor people. Second, I wanted to celebrate the courage and resistance of poor people in the rural West, the people I had been privileged to serve as chaplain. I wanted to celebrate the hundreds of years of resistance by Indigenous people, I wanted to celebrate the moments of defiance in families struggling with generational poverty, and I wanted to celebrate the leaders I was fortunate enough to work with, who organized on a local and a national level for justice. Finally, I wanted to show poor white people, who are so easily recruited by the Alt-right and other white supremacist narratives that pit them against people of color, that there was a better path of resistance. That they could join a movement across race to end poverty and to end the systems that are killing us all.
How did your experiences at The River challenge the prevailing narrative that poor white people are beyond redemption?
I think, particularly in white liberal circles, it is easy to frame poor white people as racist and backwards and think that they have no place in organizing for a better world. I wanted to both acknowledge the very real threat of white supremacy in poor white communities and to tell the stories of poor white people who joined the fight for both racial justice and an end to poverty. Beyond that, I wanted to demonstrate how capitalism deliberately pits people against each other by race in order to maintain control and make profit. White supremacy is a tool to both make poor white people feel inferior (as failed white people), and also to pit them against Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.
We are in a time, however, when people are thrown together across race for survival, like at the large homeless encampment called The River. Native and Black and white and Mexican people were all forced to try and survive, and they could only do that together.
You make the provocative claim that many white people find their redemption in respectability and capitalism, but this requires them to forget their community and past. What do you mean by this?
I believe this refers to those of us who, like me, were able to leave a poor community and get higher education but were expected to then forget where we came from. U.S. academia tends to both ignore the lived reality of most people, and the systems that produce it, and to encourage its students to develop a sense of superiority and respectability. For most of us, it is a false narrative, since many people in my generation are highly educated and still poor.
Could you elaborate on the challenges you faced Episcopal Divinity School due to the disconnect between white liberal academia and your background?
Coming from a background with very little formal education, and just out of state college, living on Brattle Street in Cambridge was extraordinary culture shock! My internships were with Ecclesia, so I was also shocked by the extraordinary gap between the academic culture around Harvard and the wider consortiums and the intense and growing poverty on the streets. When you come from a poor community, even one with deep class divides, nothing really prepares you for that level of profound inequality—the wealthiest people in the world walking past some of the poorest people in the world on the same streets. I was deeply informed by the activism and the liberation theology coming from the EDS tradition. However, I was also troubled by how far an academic understanding of the world was from the reality I came from. I was also troubled by white liberal assumptions about poor communities, including poor white communities, as somehow troubled or needy or less intelligent. I struggled to find my story in the theologies and liturgies I encountered, because even in most liberation theologies being written at the time, there was not a lot covering the economic reality in the world I was most familiar with—the poverty, the homelessness, the constant violence directed toward poor people.
How has your work with Indigenous communities informed your activism and spirituality?
I was deeply informed by the work of the various Indigenous nations in the region around Grays Harbor, both by the experiences of Native people on the streets and by the wider resistance of tribal nations. It struck me that, just two hundred years ago, the region in which I worked was one of the richest on the continent, with widespread sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, abundance of food and regional travel and trade, and a culture that both respected its people and was incredibly generous. When the United States militarily defeated Indigenous nations, the government then distributed much of the land to large timber corporations for their profit. Understanding that this initial seizure of land formed the foundation of a society built to benefit wealthy and powerful industries, allowed me to understand how we got to a community where one in 16 people were homeless. Despite that, nations like the Quinault Indian Nation or the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, and dozens of others in the region, have managed to maintain a culture of generosity and continue to fight both for their own sovereignty and for environmental protections for the land. Indigenous people taught me that returning land and sovereignty was key to both protecting the land itself from environmental disaster, but also to healing our societies so deeply destroyed by greed.
Since the publication of this book, you have decided to leave behind the Episcopal priesthood. What is next for you?
I have. I loved my work as a chaplain detailed in the book, but my path took me away from the church. I am starting a PhD program at University College Cork, studying comparative paganisms and settler colonialism, and plan to move to Ireland to do that work. I remain deeply involved in organizing to end poverty and have several writing projects I am working on around that. And I am teaching very part time at Cherry Hill Seminary, a pagan seminary in the U.S.
Finally, what do you hope readers will ultimately take away from your book, and what actions do you hope it inspires them to take in their own lives and communities?
I hope that readers will get a clearer picture of what poverty looks like in rural small towns, and the violence that all poverty entails. I hope they find hope in the leadership of poor people across the country and through five hundred years of resistance to this terrible system of capitalism and colonialism. And I hope that they can look at their own communities and find ways to get involved in organizing to end poverty and this system, from the ground up. After all I witnessed and experienced, I have come away with a deep belief in the goodness of ordinary people, a deep belief in our natural ability to love and care for and defend each other, and a deep anger at the powers that (often successfully) try to force us to hate each other to keep their own power. I also hope that poor white people can find themselves in this story and imagine ways to organize across race and oppose the white supremacy that makes them a danger to themselves and to others.