Reparation creates a standard that allows white people to negotiate and generalize the pain felt by others, projecting the things they hate about themselves and the world on Black people—that creates endless racism.

Reparation is a process that allows the subject to negotiate loss. That is, it allows the subject to regain as a whole object an object which has been split off into good parts which are maintained in the subject and bad parts which are essentially the reification on the part of the subject of the painful experience of the loss of that object. I locate liberalism's inevitable failure in its inability to allow for the possibility of loss, that is its inability to negotiate the negative. Liberalism's ideal of equality as expressible in the language of rights of man is too rigid a structure to make room for loss in any genuine sense. This is precisely because liberalism's all encompassing ideal, equality as equality of opportunity, does not leave open the possibility of identification with an object in anything but a purely positive sense. Simply put, the liberal ideal does not allow for experience of the other in any mode other than as "the same as me." An other may be free like me, they may be equal before the law like me, but may never be identified negatively as, for example, beyond me or lost to me.

A loss that the subject has no means to deal with, in this case through a reparative process, is, in a Kleinian account, projected outward. Klein terms this process of the outward projection of the painful experience of loss "projective identification." Laplanche and Pontalis define projective identification as follows, "a mechanism revealed in phantasies in which the subject inserts his self - in whole or in part - into the object..." (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p 356). That is, the process of projective identification operates unconsciously by taking some aspect or quality of the subject which is unacceptable and placing it into another object. This allows the subject to apprehend some unacceptable quality, because it is safely distanced from the subject. In a word, what cannot be experienced because it is unacceptable in oneself may be projected onto another as a way of managing that unacceptable experience. For Klein, this defense of projective identification is "the prototype of an aggressive object relation" (Klein, Quoted From Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p 356). An example of how this idea may be applied to interpret an event may be illustrative. For our event, let us imagine a student or author who, unable to cope with her inability to complete a project, angrily knocks her typewriter from the desk. Without this notion of projective identification we must assume that the student is for some reason angry with or feels threatened by the typewriter. Applying the notion of projective identification, however, we may say that the student is unable to cope with her frustration or is unable to accept her lack of creative ability. This unacceptable lack may then be projected onto the typewriter, where it can be experienced consciously and be aggressively dealt with. If then, I am correct in claiming that liberalism constitutes a rigid structure that only allows for positive identification, it should follow that the consequence of a strong attachment to liberal ideals will be the projection of a loss which it is structurally incapable of experiencing onto an other.