Only through depressive reparations can we really rupture the white phantasy.

It is in and through the depressive position that we may engage a loss in such a way that we can mourn it, instead of attempting to maintain our own pure goodness in the face of genuine loss through a magical reparative process, such as the rigid one provided by the liberal ideal.

The major function of the depressive position is the restoration of split or part objects to the status of whole objects (Bion, 1967, p 80). The depressive position is so called because it engages loss and allows for the possibility of mourning that loss. The attainment of this position is only possible in and through a reparative process. So, my claim then is that reparations may function as a reparative process which allow for the unification of a previously split America. That is, in allowing white America the narcissistic phantasy of having repaired what it had destroyed, reparations may allow for a shift to the depressive position - the precondition for experiencing America not as split up into good-white and bad-black, but rather as a unified place which may maintain positive aspects at the same time it possesses bad ones. It is only in this depressive position, precisely because it can maintain good ideals along with frustrating realities, that the genuine work of overcoming is possible.

What I hope to have shown in this paper is that by analyzing the problem of reparations from a psychoanalytic perspective we can gain some insight into what the problem of racism as it appears in America is. Further, by analyzing the problem of racism in this way it seems we have good cause to believe that reparations may offer one step towards overcoming that problem. By engaging the problem of racism as a public health problem rather than as a moral issue, a psychoanalytic analysis allows us to sidestep many of the sticky questions of moral guilt, debt, and justice which typically stall any debate on the question of slave reparations. Instead, we may make the more fundamental moral claim: that which causes human suffering shall be called evil and that which alleviates human suffering we shall call good. In so far as my analysis shows that slave reparations will alleviate real human suffering, we have both good reasons to undergo such an action and a moral imperative to do so.