Putting the responsibility for reparations on the government furthers the real injustice between individual subjects by subjecting Black America to the politics of pity.

In the above, Arendt is pointing out that as the notion of equality is perverted from a political ideal - a judicial or legal principle - to become a social concept meant to guide the way we actually experience an other on the level of the day to day, we lose a space for engaging an other in terms of real and valuable difference (Arendt, 1966, p 54). As this space is closed to us, we lose a means by which to encounter the other in any terms but those afforded us by liberalism's legal notions of personhood. It is for this reason, for example, that Baruch Spinoza was able to say, along with other fathers of enlightenment liberalism (including Immanuel Kant), "Pity, in a man who lives under the guidance of reason, is in itself bad and useless" (Spinoza, 2002, pp 346, 347). In their Dialectic of Enlightenment , Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno explain why pity must be rejected by rational, equal, liberal individuals such as Spinoza and Kant: "[Pity] confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p 80). Here, then, we have a clear example of a situation where a meeting with the other that might engage guilt or inequality is stifled from the beginning by the ideals of liberalism, which brook no emotion that opens up a space for negotiating the kind of difference that might force us to admit that inequities exist, inequities that cannot be subsumed under the general equality granted by the law.

As with all things psychoanalytic, we are in the precarious position of having to provide a genetic account of a non-linear process: we must start in the middle. I made the claim at the beginning of this paper that there exists a disparity between white and black Americans, and, further, that that disparity presents a problem that requires psychic reconciliation. Over the course of this paper, we have seen that where there is a failure on the part of our reparative phantasies a schizoid structure develops. I will now turn to an explication of the inevitable failure of liberalism's ideals to allow for a functional reparative process to take place in the situation with which we are concerned.