How Whiteness Operates

FICTION

Sociological whiteness is a gravitational field that constellated the organizing of the United States, as American as apple pie, Christianity, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. Unfortunately, to many white Americans, it is also completely invisible, by design. Many Americans who identify as white, who seek protection under the mantle of white identity, do not experience it as a force, but merely as a norm. Like any centered identity category, our experience of whiteness, from within its fortress, is only felt when provoked-when commented upon, reflected, challenged, or interrupted.

Because, as white people, we don't know what whiteness is, we are not able to see the myriad ways in which it estranges us from ourselves, others who are both white, and non-white, and the Living World. It isn't possible to change something that you can't perceive. Only awareness opens the door to the possibility of transformation.

In this surgically incisive volume, connection phenomenologist Natureza Gabriel brings the spotlight of awareness to the many ways that whiteness
operates, and the shaping forces that it bears upon our psyches, emotions, bodies, and principally our relating. Whiteness, he asserts, like all schizophrenias of supremacy, always declares itself over, never with. And yet, in this fundamental inability to experience equity and relatedness, always structures its own alienation.

These stories pierce the veil of invisibility that prevents us from understanding the ways that sociological whiteness masks our direct experience of intimacy, feeling, vitality, and connection, undermining genuine wellbeing, and taking us away from our deepest selves. A startling sequence of portraits from a deep student of connection and relationship, How Whiteness Operates offers penetrating inquiry and illuminating analysis of the most colonial of mental illnesses, as well as gestures toward possible cures.