Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations Jeffrey Prager University of California, Los Angeles Psychoanalysts assert that when wrongs have been done to others the impulse to apologize and forgive is natural, although in reality efforts toward interpersonal and social repair are often frustrated. This article assesses current debates on reparations for African Americans, applying psychoanalytic ideas to account for American resistance to engage in a process of reconciliation. Contemporary authors claim that racial repair requires a moral and ethical acknowledgment of and responsibility for harms committed to African Americans. This article demonstrates, in addition, reparations as a psychological necessity. Racism, however, emphasizing the reality of racial difference, continues, as always, to serve as a powerful defense thwarting the reparative impulse. The result has been the securing of physical separation between Whites and Blacks and the persistence of psychic enmeshment. Absent the implementation of a politics of reparations, African Americans will never achieve externality, or independence, from the White mind. KEY WORDS: reparations, American racial relations, racism, reconciliation, forgiveness, African Americans, psychoanalysis “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling... .Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way.” —James Baldwin (1962) “Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfec- tions, its perversions” —Frantz Fanon (2008) Reparations and Racism Murders of young Black men at the hands of the police, the failure to indict or prosecute those responsible, and the emergence of a formidable movement, Black Lives Matter, all within the last 637 0162-895X V C 2017 International Society of Political Psychology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, and PO Box 378 Carlton South, 3053 Victoria, Australia Political Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2017 doi: 10.1111/pops.12436