Essay One

The Sublime Art of Making Reparations

Kintsugi, Psychoanalysis, and the Sublimation of Disturbing Realities

Part II.

America appears to be in the midst of a low-intensity civil war. This apparent civil war is being fought between two rival factions: let us call them the white nationalist faction and the liberal globalist faction. As I see it, both of these factions are expressions of the unraveling American capitalist supremacy.

America was founded on white supremacy, on the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of black peoples, and the white nationalist faction in America’s apparent civil war embraces white supremacy as the central foundation of American identity. Against the white nationalists, the liberal globalist faction repudiates white supremacy, not because white supremacy is a bad thing in and of itself, but because white supremacy no longer offers American capitalism the meaningful advantages that it used to. The liberal globalists would ditch white supremacy for an ethno-cultural pluralism that is more compatible with capitalist globalization. This is not to say, however, that the liberal globalists mean to make meaningful reparations for any atrocities committed in the name of white supremacy. Rather to the contrary, liberal globalists hold that making meaningful reparations would disadvantage American capitalism far more than the maintenance of white supremacy would. Indeed, rather than making reparations, the liberal globalists want to put the atrocities of white supremacy behind them as quickly as they possibly can.

The liberal globalists claim that the white nationalists are backwards looking reactionaries and they denounce the white nationalists for holding America back. In turn, the white nationalists call the liberal globalists traitorous opportunists and hypocrites, and they denounce the liberal globalists for turning their backs on their nation’s white supremacist past while reaping the rewards of this very same past. The white nationalists, protesting against ethno-cultural pluralism, berate the liberal globalists, “You would be nothing without us and we will not be so easily forgotten! You owe us everything!”

Those who have been oppressed by white supremacy in America are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one front, oppressed peoples must protect themselves from white nationalists, who would compound past oppressions with further oppressions in the present and future. On the other front, oppressed peoples must confront the liberal globalists, who believe that they can continue to capitalize on past oppressions without contributing to further oppressions in the present and the future. These liberal globalists refuse to admit that to capitalize on past oppressions in the present and future is to further oppressions in the present and future. Indeed, oppressed peoples who see through liberal obfuscations agree with the white nationalists on one fundamental point: the liberal globalists are hypocritical opportunists.

The liberal globalists are smug in their hypocrisy. The liberal globalists tell oppressed peoples that they only have two options available to them: either (i) seek protection from a progressive global capitalism and endure its hypocrisies or (ii) fall prey to a regressive white supremacy and its atrocities. Either way, the liberal globalists tell us, reparations are not an option, “You need to move on. What’s done is done. What has been broken either cannot be repaired, or, if it can be repaired, doing so is not worth the effort.” Indeed, from the perspective of the liberal globalist, the oppressed peoples of the world who seek reparations are even more backwards looking than the white nationalists.

What the liberal globalists refuse to understand, of course, is that abolition and decolonization without reparations is a misnomer, a contradiction in terms: America will remain a white supremacist nation, a nation defined by genocide and chattel slavery, until it makes reparations. The liberal globalists who say otherwise are either white supremacists in denial or apologists for white supremacy. To put a very fine point on the matter, until America makes reparations, to be pro-American without pronounced reservations is to be pro-genocide and pro-slavery.