Only a model of reparations that embraces guilt & takes a depressive position solves in

In summation, what whiteness must negotiate in the face of disparities between white and black America must be the failure of the liberal ideal. The liberal ideal in its rigidity, however, does not allow itself the possibility of accepting that loss. Therefore, that frustration, that loss, must be projected onto an other. This projection of an unacceptable loss is a schizoid structure in so far as it reifies that loss and allows the subject to experience it - but only as a bad object, not as a loss or failure. The reason black America becomes the container of white frustrations and disappointments with American enlightenment liberal ideals is in no way arbitrary. Just as the typewriter in the above example is the focus of the writer who is disappointed with herself because it is the locus of her frustrating experience, black America becomes a bad object because it is in the encounter with the black other that white America most poignantly feels loss and frustration that is concretely related to the failure of liberalism and American ideals of equality of opportunity.

The advantage of this analysis is that it not only provides a description of racist structures but also provides a way out. If I have discovered something analogous to the infant's splitting of the breast in the paranoid-schizoid position in the structure of whiteness, we should have a way out analogous to the infant's way out. As we saw earlier, the infant overcomes the unbearable guilt of phantastic destruction through phantastic reparation. There is at this point at least good reason to suspect that reparations would work in exactly the same way. That is, if contemporary racism is in fact founded in a guilt structure fueled by omnipotent phantasy, then the thing to confront must be exactly that guilt structure. The way to deal with a guilt structure that is problematic is to diminish that guilt. I do not mean to suggest getting rid of the guilt - for then reparation would be meaningless - but to engage it. Hinshelwood writes, "Guilt... has numerous tones to it, strung out along the spectrum from horrendous and persecuting punishment to pained remorse, mourning and reparation" (Hinshelwood, 1989, p 310). On this account reparations should accomplish this by utilizing the exact same omnipotent phantasies that originated the problem to solve it. In a word, reparations may allow the white American the phantasy of having repaired something he has once destroyed.

In Kleinian terminology what this reparative phantasy shall allow is a movement from the paranoid-schizoid position, which has already been defined as a splitting of objects into fragmentary good and bad parts, to the "depressive position." It is in the depressive position that objects which have been split into good and bad may be united as whole objects that maintain both the qualities of goodness and badness. In his essay, On Hallucination Wilfred Bion nicely sums up the work the depressive position plays in evading the essentially psychotic structure of the paranoid-schizoid position. He writes The "peculiarity" of the dream to the psychotic is not its irrationality, incoherence, and fragmentation, but its revelation of objects which are felt by the patient to be whole objects and therefore fit and proper reason for the powerful feelings of guilt and depression which Melanie Klein has associated with the onset of the depressive position. Their presence is felt to be evidence that real and valued objects have been destroyed. (Bion, 1967, p 80)

The work of the depressive position is not, like the paranoid-schizoid position, to somehow evade loss but to engage it as such, to ameliorate the pain associated with the remorse felt at having destroyed a once whole object, and to acknowledge our own destructive impulse. Only by repairing an object in phantasy that in phantasy has been destroyed may the loss which was the impetus for the originary splitting be mourned. That is, if, as Bion puts it, it is through the depressive position that an object which was formally split off may be experienced as "real and valuable," it must also be through the depressive position that whiteness is able to engage the loss which I have said is at the bottom of the guilt structure that is the ground for contemporary racism. Hannah Segal describes the value of this moment in the depressive position in the following way: And here the important point is that each of those situations and persons had to be properly named and buried, that is, they had to be recognized and mourned without denial, not lost in a mass grave. When properly buried, they could eventually be given up and did not have to be kept magically alive, so that the patients' libido might be free of her fixation on them. (Segal, 1973, p 95)