Reparations shows the exertion of power in which white people believe they have the power to dictate what relieves their guilt.

The upshot of the guilt structure I have just described is that, at the same time the omnipotence and narcissism of phantasy can cause serious damage to an other, it maintains for itself an even greater power: the power to repair that same damage. The power of the unconscious to repair in phantasy what it has destroyed in phantasy is the fundamental idea that drives Klein's concept of reparation. This reparation will be the infant's way out of the horrible fate her early dependence on her mother's breast has placed upon her (Klein, 1937, p 117). Segal writes on the value of reparation for the adult as well as the infant, "His own hatred becomes less frightening as his belief increases that his love can restore what his hatred has destroyed" (Segal, 1973, p 93).

It is my contention that the guilt structure I have just described is the foundation of Fanon's manicheanism. That is, I hold that there exists a splitting activity based in the frustration of the ideals of liberalism. This splitting separates humanity into bad-black and good-white and is always accompanied by violent, unconscious phantasy. Further, I believe that by understanding white American racism in Kleinian/Fanonian terms we find not only an explanation for its strange manichean structure but also a way out analogous to the infant's way out of the paranoid-schizoid position. In a word, by appreciating the dynamic relationship between frustration, aggression, and guilt in the unconscious, we can see the nature of the problem and the structure of its solution.

In my view, Fanon's manicheanism operates on the unconscious level as a reaction formation set up in the psyche to make reasonable the difficulty that outwardly apparent disparities between white and black pose to the liberal identity of the white American. Just as the infant who cannot handle suffering or badness within itself must dispel it out into the breast, so, too, does the unconscious dispel badness experienced in the world out into objects in it. Because the psyche is structured in infancy around a tremendously frustrating relationship to an object, a structure which psychoanalysis must claim is at the root of the becoming of subjectivity, we should not be surprised that when one is confronted with something as frustrating to one's deeply held values as the enormous difference between the course of black and white lives, that one's unconscious regresses to these originary structures. Thus, just as the breast has been split into all good and all bad, humanity is split the same way.