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To understand the paradoxes of monetary liberalism, we need to contrast it to medieval European social ontologies, the background against which liberalism emerged. Scott Ferguson argues that in these social ontologies, mediating mechanisms that acted at a distance organized social communion. This social ontology placed the Holy Communion at the center of social life throughout Christendom, and the Eucharist presented the drama of a “boundless metaphysical center” to Christians who witnessed the sacrament of the Holy Communion, uniting them as a community.18 This ontology had a double function: it confirmed the hierarchical metaphysics of the Great Chain of Being and made the hierarchical social order appear self-evident.

Despite the isolated settlement patterns that marked medieval societies, people experienced social life as unified through a causality mediated at a distance, hierarchically, by God via the Church. According to Ferguson, the papal monetary system mirrored this metaphysics and social ontology: people viewed money as emanating from a center, as that which could mediate social communion at a distance. Money was a central governance institution that connected heterogeneous populations and institutions across space. In this monetary ontology, people imagined themselves as connected to each other through society’s center: the political institutions that issue money.

Much of what we identify as fiscal redistribution in our study cannot in fact be spent by households. Instead, the phrase “fiscal redistribution” is simply used to represent an inequality between a household’s tax burden and the amount government spent on them in return. It is important to be cautious when interpreting the figures from our study as representing pure redistribution of income. Our study only measures the more limited phenomenon of a household being supplied with more government spending than it pays in taxes. It does not measure actual changes in the distribution of income due to government fiscal policy.

In this article, we build on the work of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire to develop a relational understanding of dehumanization and humanization. Mindful that political projects can become oppressive when they impose a definition of the human, Fanon and Freire conceptualize humanization as that which occurs when people reject dehumanizing practices that deny their agency, begin to grasp their world-in-common, and emerge as historical agents who remake it. In such situations, people re-organize their activities, re-institute social life, and seek to realize their definition of the human. Scholars have called this approach a “critical normative” vision of (de)humanization.

We advance this critical normative vision by identifying the dehumanizing liberal monetary ontology that remains unquestioned in Fanon and Freire. To this end, we revisit John Locke’s writings in which he imagines the liberal subject as what we call a “monetary individual”: someone who assents to money use as a means to individual enrichment and just inequality. Locke also racially constitutes those who are not “proper” monetary subjects: indigenous populations who, Locke claims, had not invented any form of economic cooperation, had not assented to money as he imagines it, and remained in a state of savagery. The figure of the monetary individual, we argue, is at the core of the racial constitution of society to this day. Finally, we propose a humanizing monetary ontology informed by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which emphasizes money’s capacity to connect and include people in productive activities and enable heterogeneous forms of belonging. We show that an MMT-informed ontology can undermine the liberal monetary ontology and inform an open-ended and inclusive way of practicing society enabled by the public institution money. An MMT-informed monetary ontology reconstitutes subjects and opens up new possibilities to rethink what it means to organize people’s activities, institute social life, and realize people’s definition of the human. But first, we turn to Valayden and Feinig: Humanization as Money 147 Fanon and Freire, who see humanization as that which occurs when the dehumanized begin to grasp their world-in-common and emerge as historical agents who remake it.

Because UBI is effectively a flat universal tax credit, it’s a tax rebate for both visible and invisible taxes, and as long as the UBI amount is larger than the amount of tax a particular person is paying, then that person experiences an increase in buying power, not a loss of buying power.

Now also consider Jeff Bezos with his $200 billion in untaxed wealth doing everything he can to avoid paying taxes. Can he avoid his $200 billion being effectively worth $190 billion as a result of 5% inflation? No. And if he gets an additional $24,000 in UBI does that in any way compensate him for what is effectively a wealth tax of $10 billion? No, it doesn’t. Let’s also consider that Bezos’ wealth grew from July 2020 to July 2021 by $23 billion, in which case his wealth still would have grown by the total wealth of 13 billionaires in this invisible wealth tax scenario.

Many opponents of UBI say an adequate amount which is covering all basic human needs is not feasible because of its costs. These critics just multiply the amount of UBI with the number of recipients in a country to calculate the gross cost which is a huge amount of money. They ignore the proposed changes to the tax and benefit system to finance UBI which would lead to much lower net cost. Geoff takes a different approach. He argues that states can create their own money and fund UBI in this way. This was done during the recent financial crisis using ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE). The beneficiaries of QE were the large banks and the wealth holders in our societies. The share and property prices have boomed due to QE. Theories of money are relevant to the financing question of Basic Income. Therefore UBI supporters need to better understand these theories in order to consider all financing options of UBI. GC claims that UBI is a necessary remedy for the major causes of our recurrent economic crises. The stability of our economic and financial system increasingly relies on the recurrent injection of ‘unearned’ income. According to the former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May in the United Kingdom (UK) there was no magic money tree. She used this argument to justify the austerity measures of her government. Similarly many politicians and economists want us to believe that a state economy is similar to a household economy. GC challenges this comparison as misleading. Instead he states ‘Money has no inherent value, but only the value it derives by being socially accepted to purchase goods, services, assets, and raw materials. The reality is that as a society, we can consume what we can produce, and money is only an intermediary in this process, like oil in a machine.’ He further explains ‘Higher productivity using technological automation will require more money to be created to represent the value of that production.’ Sovereign Money means that governments, through their central banks, simply issue money without that money being added to the national debt. This is in line with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which argues that a sovereign state can create its own currency. GC argues that the creation of money to service the economy should never be defined as national debt. A good example is the UK creation of £394 billion of money during the COVID pandemic. This money was initially created as government debt and then bought back by the Bank of England. The Bank of England is part of the state. Therefore there is no net national debt, because the state owns its own debts. It is a good example of debt-free sovereign money. As a consequence of his theory GC rephrases the typical argument against further government borrowing ‘How much national debt can the government afford?’ into 'The real constraint on any economy is the level of real production output which the economy can achieve. Governments can afford to spend according to what the economy can produce, not according to the Treasury’s financial balance.’ Most UBI proposals choose revenue-neutral or budget-balancing approaches with a change of the tax-benefit system. They propose increases of income taxes for top earners or unearned income, the introduction of carbon, land value and wealth taxes and the removal of certain social benefits which become redundant with a UBI. According to GC these approaches do not address the major dysfunctions in our current economies. We need to get more income to people and get debt out of our economic system. Therefore his proposal is bolder, addresses the technology challenge of increasing production without a similar increase in the total amount of earned income and the increasing debts of households and states.

Darity and Mullen also propose in their book several ways the federal government could fund reparations without imposing new taxes. One way, they discuss is by funding through deficit spending. Deficit spending -- defined as the government spending more than it collects -- Darity and Mullen write, would require no change in tax rates, and if reparations provide a stimulus, could actually generate a tax revenue to fund the program. They also suggest that the Federal Reserve could fund reparations in much the same way it funded investment banks during the Great Recession. Because of the bailout by the Federal Reserve, Darity and Mullen make the argument that "there can be no doubt that the Fed has vast capacity to provide the funds required for a properly designed and financed reparations program." Private sector Meanwhile, as increasing evidence emerges of private sector culpability or complacency in the slave trade, many are also calling on these entities which still exist today to pay reparations. A slew of banks, life insurance companies and even universities have been thrust into the spotlight recently after evidence emerged they were involved in the slave trade. Georgetown University admitted in recent years to selling 272 slaves in 1838 to pay off debts and ultimately keep the school open. In 2019, the private university announced the creation of a fund it said could generate $400,000 a year in scholarships to benefit the descendants of these people.

Having now lived through the novel coronavirus pandemic, and having witnessed with my own eyes the politics of what was made possible in response, and what was still not considered possible even at the height of Great Depression levels of mass unemployment, I have come to the following conclusion: UBI in the form of a fully universal payment to all Americans is unlikely to ever happen without MMT logic gaining sufficient influence among policymakers. Why do I say this? Because even in a time of national emergency, and even when the most money was ever spent, there remained an insistence on targeting. Full universality was still unattainable because of a belief that only those “in need” should get a stimulus check, even when we knew that definitions of need were utilizing old tax returns that were no longer relevant in 2020. People just couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that targeting could be achieved on the back end via taxes. Pay people first. Tax them last. Taxation achieves the desired targeting by removing money ex post instead of ex ante. But we didn't do that because there was still a concern about the price tag of the legislation and keeping it as small as possible on the front end. MMT is a pivotal mindset shift by looking at taxation differently. With MMT, taxation goes from being the source of funding to being the tool to accomplish certain goals like inflation management, inequality reduction, and incentive shifting. It means going from an additive mindset to a subtractive one. It’s like the difference between filling a hole with one shovel full of dirt at a time, or dumping a pile of dirt into that same hole followed by bulldozing away the excess. Taxation is about avoiding the excess of dirt after the hole is full, not about figuring out just the right amount of dirt to put into the hole in the first place. Understanding UBI is helped by using this same subtractive mindset. Everyone gets money, and then money is deleted for some more than others via taxes. Because taxes aren’t about funding, and are instead about shaping the outcome of the policy, the focus shifts from how to pay for UBI to how to best shape the UBI. The type and amount of taxes used in combination with the level of UBI determines who is and isn’t a net recipient of UBI after taxes. Instead of deciding who should and shouldn’t get income using an inefficient and error-prone means-test, the combination of UBI and taxes makes those with lower incomes into net recipients who receive more in UBI than they pay in total taxes, while making those with higher incomes pay more in total taxes than they receive in UBI. Targeting does nothing but create unnecessary bureaucracy, holes for people in need to fall through, damaging stigma and distrust, and excessive marginal tax rates. Pay 'em all and let taxes sort 'em out. Utilizing taxation as a tool of targeting through subtraction opens up all kinds of new additional benefits. Carbon taxes go from “paying for” UBI to reducing inflation plus also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Value-added taxes and automated universal transaction taxes go from “paying for” UBI to reducing inflation plus also clawing back the UBI from those doing the most consuming plus also incentivizing savings and investment over consumption. Land-value taxes go from “paying for” UBI to reducing inflation and wealth inequality plus also incentivizing housing development and disincentivizing idle land speculation. Intellectual property fees go from “paying for” UBI to reducing inflation plus also disincentivizing patent trolling and incentivizing a larger public domain. Etc. As soon as we start thinking about taxes as a tool of erasing money and disincentivizing specific choices, a lot of tax options make a lot more sense, while other tax options like taxing income make a lot less sense. With MMT, the question changes from “How do we pay for it?” to “We’ve decided this is important and we have the resources to do it, so we’re doing it, but what’s the best mix of ways to make the best most efficient use of our resources to achieve the best outcomes doing it?” We have to stop thinking about what something costs at the federal level. If it’s important and we can do it, then we should do it, and then manage the economy around that, around us, because that’s the entire point of the economy, to work for us. We are at the center, so it should serve us, not the other way around. The limits of what we can actually do are determined by our actual physical capacity to do it, not by some construct we call money. To me, this kind of mindset shift opens the door to a new kind of economy, a human-centered economy, a resource-based economy, where we start asking deeper questions about what the point of all of this is in the first place. What’s the point of money? Why did we develop all of this technology in the first place? Shouldn’t the economy we create together work for all of us, and shouldn’t it be engineered in a way that maximizes human wellbeing and minimizes our negative impacts on the ecosystem that makes all human life possible? And shouldn't all of it be built on a foundation of human rights that secures freedom and dignity for all? In conclusion, I propose we need MMT and UBI, and also MMT and UBI need each other. MMT needs UBI to achieve the best use of available resources with the most optimal outcomes, and UBI needs MMT in order to achieve full universality, and in order to move from questions about affordability to questions of optimal tax design. Without UBI, MMT’s reliance on FJG alone will reduce total potential productivity by suboptimal allocation of resources and inferior amounts of demand and intrinsic motivation. Without MMT, UBI seems less likely to be viewed as a stigma-free right and more likely to be limited to implementations like the stimulus checks that include means-testing and thus all the problems that go along with non-universality. Going forward, I am far less interested in conveying UBI as having “pay-fors” as I am in conveying how to best go about UBI. What’s the highest amount of UBI we can achieve with our total economic capacity fully utilized? What’s the best way or mix of ways, including but not limited to taxes, to best manage inflation to avoid exceeding our total economic capacity? Can we use inflation itself as a signaling tool to help us determine which specific supply-side investments we need to make while protecting people with low and fixed incomes from the regressive effects of inflation? As we design an optimal UBI implementation, can we also reduce or even eliminate income taxes as part of that approach by instead leaning on a mix of other taxes that tax stuff we want less of? Can we change the way people look at money, taxes, and government itself to something more visionary and less divisive? I think we can, and if you don’t agree yet, please next go read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, and also more of my own writings about UBI to dive deeper into its importance as the foundation upon which to build a higher functioning society and a better, more prosperous future. We can do a lot better, and I think it begins with MMT and UBI.

How would a slavery reparations program be funded? Deficit spending is the most feasible approach. The taxes needed to support such an expensive program would be onerous. And there is precedent for it: In 1833, the United Kingdom passed the Slavery Abolition Act across much of the British Empire. 51 It paid to liberate its enslaved population by compensating slave owners to the tune of £20 million through deficit spending (£2.4 billion/$3.11 billion today). 52 To put the cost of slavery reparations in context: The program would be less pricey than the proposed outlays for proposals for Medicare for All at $20.5 trillion and the Green New Deal at an estimated $50-$90 trillion. 53 54 Where the Campaign for Reparations Stands Now The most recent version of H.R. 40, the bill that would set up a federal commission to study slavery reparations, has been endorsed by President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. When it was introduced, the bill had 157 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. The bill had not made it out of committee in the 31 years since it was first introduced. 4 44 But on April 19, 2021, the Judiciary Committee advanced the bill to the U.S. House of Representatives on a 25-17 vote. 55 It currently has 176 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats. It would need 60 votes in the Senate to be passed.

Locke’s monetary theory of society invisibilized two sets of relations. First, when he argued that money comes into existence through individual volition, Locke obscured the relation between money issuers and money users that had been more visible in medieval Europe. Because this relation disappears, Locke’s monetary individualism eclipses central political questions any society must answer. Who gets to issue money, on what terms, and how much of it? Through which channels will cash and credit reach members of a population? Answers to these questions shape the design and constitution of social relations.30 In Locke’s telling, however, monetary individuals “tacitly assent” to money, and do not seek to understand or take part in money creation. They accept whatever money reaches them and celebrate the inequality that is its result. In this scenario, the political institutions that create money disappear from view. Besides eclipsing the relation between money issuer and money users, Locke erased all forms of institutionalizing economic life that did not fall under his conception of money. Locke erased Native monetary forms and ways of coordinating economic life when he argued that Natives were limited to uncoordinated action without a link to the past and to the future. He presented a particular understanding of money, and the particular forms of individuated agency and inequality his monetary individuals ought to exhibit, as universally normative. He considered it a yardstick for judging all societies and made all other modes of being-human-in-society appear uniform and deficient, eclipsing the generalized character of monetary forms across human societies.31

Locke’s theory of money constitutes the liberal social ontology: He proposed ways of inventing identities, categorizing people, being in the world, and possibilities for acting. While Fanon and Freire provided expansive critiques of dehumanization and elements for a re-humanization of the world, they left untouched the (Lockean) monetary ontology that constitutes modern forms of governance. This monetary ontology, expressed through the category of monetary individualism, continues to “immerse” (in the Freirean sense above) its critics and proponents, who remain within a dehumanizing “inertia” (in the Fanonian sense). It is important to make the monetary dimension of Locke’s ontology visible because we continue to live with it today.

Monetary individualism and its corollary, monetary racism, are at the core of liberalism’s paradoxical ontology. In this logic, monetary individuals leave a state of nature to form society through a “tacit agreement” to money. They accept money’s verdict—inevitable inequality. Because accepting money’s verdict constitutes them as monetary individuals, they leave untouched the always-political processes of money creation, and oppose anyone who politicizes money creation. If it remains unchallenged, Locke’s monetary theory of racism will continue to inform dehumanization and obscure emancipatory possibilities that are at arm’s reach.

An MMT ontology, in contrast, emphasizes the money issuer’s capacity to connect and include people in productive activities and enables heterogeneous forms of belonging. This ontology makes the liberal monetary ontology visible as dehumanizing and enables people to relate to the money issuer as that which anchors their belonging and connectedness. Therefore, we propose to adapt the Fanonian/Freirian definition of humanization: humanization is that which occurs when people reject the Lockean monetary ontology that fixes their identities and forms of agency, when they begin to understand money as the anchor of collective life and emerge as political beings who participate in the monetary making of society.

A range of actors continue to reproduce the liberal monetary ontology in a form almost identical to the Lockean logic, even if they update the vocabulary. When politicians claim that large numbers of Black people in the United States are “welfare state dependent,” they echo the Lockean idea that these people do not add to societal wealth. When charitable foundations propose to teach “financial literacy” and “better money habits” to disadvantaged people, they echo the Lockean idea that they are not (yet) monetary individuals characterized by rationality and industriousness. When politicians claim that inequality is due to a lack of personal responsibility and discipline, they echo the Lockean idea that some populations are less economically rational than others. When “developers” “improve” neighborhoods by gentrifying them, and replace current inhabitants with people who have more money, they echo the Lockean idea that there is nothing to be destroyed because the previous inhabitants could not make economic use of the space. Such statements are not just racially charged: they constitute monetary individuals as they constitute race.

And if the racially excluded protest against income and wealth disparities or point to political-economic power relations, the Lockean logic takes their objections as proof that they are not yet monetary individuals. Whoever fails to accept money’s verdict places themselves outside of the group of monetary individuals. Placing oneself outside of this group means a loss of stature, belonging, and becoming inconsequential. From a Lockean perspective, questioning money’s verdict means questioning money itself because acceptance of this verdict is inherent in money. And refusing money’s verdict seems to cause a tear in the fabric of the social order.

Institutionalist approaches to money have long undermined Lockean certainties. Seeing money as an institution means challenging Locke’s narrative about monetary individuals who tacitly consent to money and inequality, accept the justice of money’s verdict, and understand themselves as distinct from people they think exist “without” money. In recent years, MMT has offered critical elements for undermining the Lockean ontology in the scholarly and the broader public sphere, in the United States and beyond.

MMT presents a direct ontological challenge to monetary individualism. It begins with the relation between a governing center and its population, between money issuer and money users, not with monetary individuals who tacitly agree to using money in exchange. MMT argues that public authorities develop money to mobilize resources (for instance, to equip armed forces, or to build roads and schools). They make their money acceptable by imposing obligations on money users: they levy taxes and fines, forcing a population to acquire the currency needed to discharge them. Because of the widespread demand for money, the currency begins to circulate among the population.

While the instances above can be considered micro-traumas, the impact of more intense traumatic experiences of POC in response to unexamined white guilt warrants further discussion. I understand why Caflisch may have opted for less elaboration on this topic, as white writers face ethical risks describing the trauma of POC. I also understand the risk I face by elaborating on more serious trauma: that is, to potentially worsen the sense of irreparability that may already be felt by white people. However, per Baldwin (1962), “nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

I would like to focus on a scenario that Caflisch describes, a scene familiar to me as one of few POC typically in attendance at academic and psychoanalytic panels on race. She describes the unraveling of the audience members in response to the content on race. Commentary that “reverse[s] course” (Caflisch, this issue, p. 587) to perceived social danger, and the refusal of white people as a group (or vocal members of a group) to accept whatever has been said as applicable to themselves. If the disorganization is not claimed by the actors, then it is absorbed by the bystanders who represent both white and the few POC in the audience. In this way, the impact of trauma sees no color. In the many times, I have found myself in this scenario, I too perceive social danger, difficulty in following my thoughts, and start to question whether or not I am to blame if I asked a question or made a comment. Statements like “‘this is not who we are’” (Caflisch, this issue) make me wonder whether I am included in the “we,” since I do not look like the crowd or the speaker. Since I am not white, maybe the “this is not us” implies that the badness is then because of me, or people who look like me. I sit silently, continuing to listen to comments wondering whether I am the only one questioning who is to blame or feeling offended. I question whether what I am experiencing is real and I weigh the decision to ask a question to figure out if what I am experiencing is real—knowing that a “no” from the speaker will destroy me. For me, asking a question will not only give me an opportunity to clarify but is also an opportunity for protest, and I need the protest: I need to protest the aggression that I feel projected onto me. After all, there are already so many mainstream and community-specific messages insinuating that, as a Black, queer, androgynous appearing woman, there is something wrong about me.

After having confronted white people about comments or behaviors that are prejudicial in nature, I have found myself feeling shame, difficulty thinking, and an aggressive desire to apologize to them. These projections occur across all social settings that include white people with strangers, friends, and colleagues including those within the psychoanalytic community. I perceive a deferral of responsibility exemplified through statements like “I didn’t mean it that way,” “I’m not racist,” or “you know what I meant.” These statements may seem minor, but illustrate the wish of the aggressor not to be wrong. These wishes can be so strong that many times, I end up being the one offering an apology instead. While the intent may not be to make me feel at fault, where is the guilt to osmose if not to its original source, white people, but to me instead? In this way, Caflisch’s (this issue) observations ring true: white guilt can “cover over” (p. 581) and lead to demands for comfort and forgiveness. What is covered over does not evaporate, it serves as a reminder to the POC that they cannot breach the white person’s sense of reality or put themselves at risk for negating their own. The POC must then choose whether to continue the conversation and risk drifting deeper into the denial of the aggressor, preemptively internalize the blame before it is further projected onto them by the aggressor, or dissociate from the experience altogether. There are more hopeful possibilities, such as sublimating into a positive outlet, though these are only available if a POC is able to do so amidst the bombardment of daily racially themed assaults.

For these reasons, I identify with Dr. Caflisch’s discussion of paranoid anxieties from her perspective as a white person: I have felt them. For the POC who empathizes with the white subject, the desire to avoid white guilt makes sense, and demands for forgiveness may be met albeit superficial. However, the consequence of a refusal to interrogate white guilt is that it removes the option for harm reduction the next time conflict happens—and the cycle of harm continues. Many times, I have been faced with the decision to confront a white person about racist comments with the fear of immediate harm to me as well as downstream harm to POC. The most psychologically damaging conflicts are those that are met with skepticism about my claims of racism, or those that result in critical statements about POC in general. Most often, these statements serve to label POC as “unprofessional” using coded language that really signifies “not-white” behavior. Both have the potential for widespread harm because not only do they undermine the reputation of POC through trickle-down social dynamics but also reinforce aversively racist gestures to others in the vicinity who are susceptible to influence. In these moments, I am left with two undesirable options: either confront the speaker for the prejudicial nature of the comment and risk being perceived as unprofessional myself. In either case, I risk bearing the responsibility for processing these feelings with the aggressor after they have been projected into me. The end result is hurt; hurt that is sometimes too painful to keep present in consciousness and is cast out into the subconscious of my psyche.

That there exists some degree of splitting up America into white and black is, I hope, not a contentious point and is certainly not something we need psychoanalysis to discover. Further, that the process of splitting is always violent is no great discovery. What a Kleinian psychoanalysis brings to the table is the claim that violent splitting always accompanies violent phantasy. In Freud's words, the splitting that begets these violent phantasies "correct the world"; in Jamesian terms it makes the world "more rational" (James, 1897, p 317; Freud, 1908, p 299). By exploring the role this violent phantasy plays in our psychical lives we gain a tool for explaining the recalcitrant nature of racist structures in our outwardly liberal culture. That is, instead of having to claim that ours is a nation of knowing hypocrites who hold to a secret racism as against the cultural ideal of equality, and who are somehow impervious to the imposition of a broadly held moral standard, we may instead say that what we are up against is a symptom of the failure of exactly that moral standard, that is, equality.

On this account then there is a direct genetic link between liberalism's claim on the equality of men and contemporary white racism. Specifically, because liberalism lacks a means to negotiate its own failing, the inconsistency between its ideals and our reality must be psychically reconciled, and the defense which operates to mend this inconsistency has as a direct product anti-black racism. In the Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt approaches this very thought from the standpoint of political theory rather than from depth psychology, Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. (Arendt, 1966, p 54)

This paper examines the question of slave reparations in light of Melanie Klein's notion of reparation, as presented in her essay Love, Guilt and Reparation , and the "Manichean" position described in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1961, p 41). Approaching this question from a psychoanalytic perspective allows the problem to be addressed in ways that ethical constructs do not. That is, by asking the question of consequences in light of sound theory the cart is not put before the horse. Instead of asking a theoretical question and providing a theoretical answer, a psychoanalytic inquiry posed in a pragmatic vein can raise and answer the question in recognition of the co-determination of the ends and means involved in an ethical situation. It is not the goal of this paper to argue that the issue of reparations should not be asked in terms of justice, equitability, or even debt, but rather to argue that by momentarily suspending these questions in favor of the public health question "what will decrease our suffering?," we may learn something more that can aid us in reaching a conclusion as regards reparations. We may also come to understand better the phantasies that structure contemporary whiteness such that racism continues to be a reality.

Throughout Balbus' work evidence is adduced and analysis presented of situations in which black people become the containers for split-off white American phantasy. It is in his explanation of why this is the case that Balbus consistently falls short. In his first example, Balbus proffers no explanation for the apparently contradictory situation of white Americans applauding the ease and comfort with which African-Americans supposedly comport themselves while at the same time also decrying supposed black laziness and relaxed attitudes to the norms of white and professional society. In the second example above, Balbus does forward a hypothesis to explain the conflicting stereotypes of black people as both beautiful and dirty. His explanation in short is that black people are regarded in this strange schizoid way because they are black. Indeed, throughout all the examples Balbus marshals of splitting up of black America we are given no explanation for why it is black people and not somebody else who contains these prejudices for the white imagination other than, and not in all cases, that black people have darker colored skin. Balbus thus waffles between two positions, both of which are problematic and contradict one another. On the one hand, when Balbus provides no explanation for why it is that black people are the containers of split-off white phantasy, one is left with nothing but the Sartrean position which holds that there is nothing unique or peculiar about the material and political conditions of black people in America such that anti-black racism continues to exist or present problems for us. Rather, it is all an unhappy accident, a case requiring no more historical analysis then to lament that someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, when Balbus offers an explanation for why it happens to be the case that white fears and phantasies are projected onto black people, his only explanation is that it is due to black people's blackness, their dark skin. But this risks a kind of biological determinism. That is to say, it seems that on this account we (all humans) are predisposed to project all the unresolved conflicts of the anal phase of development onto black people. The broader problems of a biological account of racism aside, if this account is correct the issue of reparations becomes quite impossible for a number of reasons. First, instead of an ameliorative step in the right direction, the payment and reception of reparations would have to become a permanent fixture in the lives of all people as new people are born and older people project anew - presuming they have not received a masterful psychoanalysis which would relieve them of the unresolved conflicts Balbus places at the root of these racist structures. Second, the question of who shall pay whom becomes infinitely complicated. If we presume a biological and ahistorical force behind racism, the old problems with debt and ownership become a trifle compared to the problems involved in approaching reparations. This is because presumably black people, and everyone else, would have to pay reparations as well. To point out that justice clearly could not condone this is to ignore the fact that if black people are denied the opportunity to pay reparations they are thus denied the opportunity for growth Balbus and myself believe reparations will offer.

In summation, what whiteness must negotiate in the face of disparities between white and black America must be the failure of the liberal ideal. The liberal ideal in its rigidity, however, does not allow itself the possibility of accepting that loss. Therefore, that frustration, that loss, must be projected onto an other. This projection of an unacceptable loss is a schizoid structure in so far as it reifies that loss and allows the subject to experience it - but only as a bad object, not as a loss or failure. The reason black America becomes the container of white frustrations and disappointments with American enlightenment liberal ideals is in no way arbitrary. Just as the typewriter in the above example is the focus of the writer who is disappointed with herself because it is the locus of her frustrating experience, black America becomes a bad object because it is in the encounter with the black other that white America most poignantly feels loss and frustration that is concretely related to the failure of liberalism and American ideals of equality of opportunity.

The advantage of this analysis is that it not only provides a description of racist structures but also provides a way out. If I have discovered something analogous to the infant's splitting of the breast in the paranoid-schizoid position in the structure of whiteness, we should have a way out analogous to the infant's way out. As we saw earlier, the infant overcomes the unbearable guilt of phantastic destruction through phantastic reparation. There is at this point at least good reason to suspect that reparations would work in exactly the same way. That is, if contemporary racism is in fact founded in a guilt structure fueled by omnipotent phantasy, then the thing to confront must be exactly that guilt structure. The way to deal with a guilt structure that is problematic is to diminish that guilt. I do not mean to suggest getting rid of the guilt - for then reparation would be meaningless - but to engage it. Hinshelwood writes, "Guilt... has numerous tones to it, strung out along the spectrum from horrendous and persecuting punishment to pained remorse, mourning and reparation" (Hinshelwood, 1989, p 310). On this account reparations should accomplish this by utilizing the exact same omnipotent phantasies that originated the problem to solve it. In a word, reparations may allow the white American the phantasy of having repaired something he has once destroyed.

This paper will operate under the assumption that to be white in America involves being confronted with disparities between white and black citizens in all realms of life. On this point one need not look beyond the wildly disproportionate number of black people in the prison system or dilapidated urban ghettos that are populated almost exclusively by people of color, despite near constant calls to address both problems and to observe both the disparity of the situations of white and black Americans as well as the tenacity with which that disparity maintains itself. In his preface to The Wretched of the Earth , Jean-Paul Sartre describes the experience of this disparity when it meets with liberal humanism in the voice of the native: "your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist method sets us apart" (Sartre, 1961, p 10). Further, I maintain, in deference to William James' Sentiment of Rationality , that whenever possible human beings will adjust their world views in an effort to make the "somewhat chaotic view which everyone by nature carries about with him under his hat" subside in favor of a more rational narrative of the events that surround them (James, 1897, p 317). These two views together form the basic assumption of this paper: that is, that disparity in real or perceived material conditions between white and black America creates a psychical demand to make rational a situation that confronts one daily, that is, racism.

Melanie Klein's notion of reparation centers on aggression and pre-oedipal infantile development. Though there are places in her work where she flirts with social psychology, none of her writings is explicitly political. Because of this a roundabout path must be taken to bring Klein into the political realm, the realm of slave reparations. To accomplish this I will first focus on Frantz Fanon's work in The Wretched of the Earth , which is explicitly both political and psychoanalytic. I will then attempt to draw out a link between the two writers to show how a Kleinian interpretation of the data collected by Fanon affords us a constructive understanding of the relationship of the oppressor to the oppressed.

The injustices and horrors that were common place in the antebellum United States may live for some only as they are presented in history books but for others the lingering effects from slavery are felt in everyday life. So, how do we, as a nation, begin to undo the wrongs that were committed? Many argue that reparations would be an official way for white America to recognize their wrongs and allow for closure in the African American and Black communities to begin while providing resources that have traditionally been denied to people of color. I agree that reparations would do all of these things but they would also carry a host of unintended consequences that would devastate progress within the Civil Rights Movement.

1. How do you quantify the impact of centuries of enslavement?