Monetary Reparations are not about acknowledging or undoing the injustice done to black people: it’s about reducing the guilt of liberal whites and is an ultimately narcissistic goal. Even if the government tried to pay this debt back, it would only be within the framework of white benevolence.

From the first perspective, I have been arguing for the importance of recognizing that some of the harms caused by racism and white supremacy are, in fact, irreparable; that some of the privileges we hold as white people are “built on crime” in an indelible way; and that the guilt, and even the moments of hopelessness, that this reality can evoke for liberal white people is something we need to learn to sit with, and bear, without looking for the relief of reparation to make it go away. This stance is captured evocatively in an exchange from Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2019). In it, a liberal, white male art collector, deeply invested in being perceived as a “good” white person on the side of racial justice, but hesitant to look at the ways in which he is also implicated in racial oppression, is speaking with a Black female artist whose work he wants to acquire. As she urges him to recognize his own participation in the white supremacist system he critiques without rushing to cast himself as a white savior, he laments: “That is so hopeless.” “Go further into that hopelessness,” she replies, “and then we can begin to really see each other” (p. 87). Sometimes trying to move immediately to reparation, in other words, can cause us to avoid the kind of internal reckoning and interpersonal understanding that we need in order to engage, deeply, with the realities of racial injustice and our role in it. The second perspective, which I see as complementary, is that some of the harms of racism may seem irreparable not because they are, but because of how we relate, as white people, to what reparation is and should be, which in turn deeply affects how we relate to racial guilt. As liberal white people, we may imagine reparation not in the sense Klein intended, which involves an acknowledgment of loss and of our own limits; but instead as a fantasy of omnipotence and erasure known in Kleinian theory as “manic reparation” (Klein, 1935, 1940; Mitchell, 2000; Sodre, 2015). In other words, a desire “to repair the object in such a way that guilt and loss are never experienced” (Segal, 1973, p. 95). This manic approach to racial reparation – described by philosopher Shannon Sullivan (2014) as a “desire to pay off and thus sever (our) connections with white history” (p. 70), and by Suchet (2017) as a wish to be “a different kind of white … expunged of some of the guilt and shame of whiteness” (p. 50) – is ultimately more about establishing our own exceptionalism than about meaningful repair. The problem, however, isn’t only that thinking about reparation in this way – as something cathartic that will erase what we owe and restore ourselves to an idealized state of “goodness,” debtless and clean – is essentially a narcissistic goal, though I believe it is. The problem is also that it is an impossible goal.