A Kleinian account of the role of reparations in the emotional development of the individual suggests that a reparative response to African Americans on the part of white people would require a confrontation with the anxiety and guilt accompanying the awareness of the harm they have done, or fantasized doing, to black people. A successful confrontation with this “depressive” racial anxiety and guilt would diminish demonizing and idealizing fantasies about black people and result in more realistic representations of, and relationships with, them. But that anxiety and guilt are also likely to engender “manic” denials of responsibility for the suffering of black people. Thus, current calls for racial reparations are a challenge for white people to overcome the very resistance that they evoke.