Their framework for racism doesn’t prescribe the root cause of Black people as the object of white phantasies—it means their analysis falls short, which dooms their plan to dismiss racism as an ‘unhappy accident’.

Throughout Balbus' work evidence is adduced and analysis presented of situations in which black people become the containers for split-off white American phantasy. It is in his explanation of why this is the case that Balbus consistently falls short. In his first example, Balbus proffers no explanation for the apparently contradictory situation of white Americans applauding the ease and comfort with which African-Americans supposedly comport themselves while at the same time also decrying supposed black laziness and relaxed attitudes to the norms of white and professional society. In the second example above, Balbus does forward a hypothesis to explain the conflicting stereotypes of black people as both beautiful and dirty. His explanation in short is that black people are regarded in this strange schizoid way because they are black. Indeed, throughout all the examples Balbus marshals of splitting up of black America we are given no explanation for why it is black people and not somebody else who contains these prejudices for the white imagination other than, and not in all cases, that black people have darker colored skin. Balbus thus waffles between two positions, both of which are problematic and contradict one another. On the one hand, when Balbus provides no explanation for why it is that black people are the containers of split-off white phantasy, one is left with nothing but the Sartrean position which holds that there is nothing unique or peculiar about the material and political conditions of black people in America such that anti-black racism continues to exist or present problems for us. Rather, it is all an unhappy accident, a case requiring no more historical analysis then to lament that someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, when Balbus offers an explanation for why it happens to be the case that white fears and phantasies are projected onto black people, his only explanation is that it is due to black people's blackness, their dark skin. But this risks a kind of biological determinism. That is to say, it seems that on this account we (all humans) are predisposed to project all the unresolved conflicts of the anal phase of development onto black people. The broader problems of a biological account of racism aside, if this account is correct the issue of reparations becomes quite impossible for a number of reasons. First, instead of an ameliorative step in the right direction, the payment and reception of reparations would have to become a permanent fixture in the lives of all people as new people are born and older people project anew - presuming they have not received a masterful psychoanalysis which would relieve them of the unresolved conflicts Balbus places at the root of these racist structures. Second, the question of who shall pay whom becomes infinitely complicated. If we presume a biological and ahistorical force behind racism, the old problems with debt and ownership become a trifle compared to the problems involved in approaching reparations. This is because presumably black people, and everyone else, would have to pay reparations as well. To point out that justice clearly could not condone this is to ignore the fact that if black people are denied the opportunity to pay reparations they are thus denied the opportunity for growth Balbus and myself believe reparations will offer.