Attempts to rationalize racism will inevitably fail—understandings of the physical toll racism has on the psyche isn’t solved by handouts.

This paper will operate under the assumption that to be white in America involves being confronted with disparities between white and black citizens in all realms of life. On this point one need not look beyond the wildly disproportionate number of black people in the prison system or dilapidated urban ghettos that are populated almost exclusively by people of color, despite near constant calls to address both problems and to observe both the disparity of the situations of white and black Americans as well as the tenacity with which that disparity maintains itself. In his preface to The Wretched of the Earth , Jean-Paul Sartre describes the experience of this disparity when it meets with liberal humanism in the voice of the native: "your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist method sets us apart" (Sartre, 1961, p 10). Further, I maintain, in deference to William James' Sentiment of Rationality , that whenever possible human beings will adjust their world views in an effort to make the "somewhat chaotic view which everyone by nature carries about with him under his hat" subside in favor of a more rational narrative of the events that surround them (James, 1897, p 317). These two views together form the basic assumption of this paper: that is, that disparity in real or perceived material conditions between white and black America creates a psychical demand to make rational a situation that confronts one daily, that is, racism.

Melanie Klein's notion of reparation centers on aggression and pre-oedipal infantile development. Though there are places in her work where she flirts with social psychology, none of her writings is explicitly political. Because of this a roundabout path must be taken to bring Klein into the political realm, the realm of slave reparations. To accomplish this I will first focus on Frantz Fanon's work in The Wretched of the Earth , which is explicitly both political and psychoanalytic. I will then attempt to draw out a link between the two writers to show how a Kleinian interpretation of the data collected by Fanon affords us a constructive understanding of the relationship of the oppressor to the oppressed.

In The Wretched of the Earth , Fanon uses case work from his tenure at a psychiatric institution during the Algerian revolution to describe the psychical structures which develop in response to a situation of oppression. His work is unique in that it focuses equally on the psychical adaptations of the oppressor and the oppressed, adaptations Fanon refers to as "mental disorders of a reactionary type" (Fanon, 1961, p 254). In his Conclusions chapter, we find evidence that he believed his findings applied to the state of race relations in America as well as those in colonial Africa between native and colonizer. "Two centuries ago," he claims, "a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions" (Fanon, 1961, p 313).