Every day across the U.S., 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 whites: 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. Here we meet residents of an encampment on the banks of the Chehalis River, who face sweeps and evictions and are targeted by vigilantes before bringing their case to federal court. Here we watch a community grapple with desperation, government neglect, and its own racism. We accompany Monroe on visits to jails and flophouses and tent cities and on trips to hospitals and funeral homes, and we see leaders forging connections between their people and the global movement to end poverty.

With trenchant insight borne of liberation theology, radical politics, and an even more radical hope, Monroe introduces us to people hammering out survival strategies and hope in the abandoned zones of empire. 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 whites reject the empty promises of white supremacy and embrace solidarity with other poor people? What if they join the resistance to the system that is, slowly or quickly, killing us all?

Human beings aren’t trash; it’s the system that enables humans to imagine each other as such that needs to end. Trash asks us to see anew the peril in which poor white people live, and the choices we all must make.