One of the unique conceptual tools that psychoanalysis brings to the analysis of racism is the notion of fantasy. Fantasy is what arranges and makes sense of the intensities of racist passions; it narrativizes the libidinal enjoyment of racism. For Lacanian approaches in particular, fantasy provides an answer to the enigmatic question of what the Other desires (a fantasmatic answer thus to Fanon's query: 'What does the black man want?'). Such fantasmatic answers typically take a twofold form, highlighting both a nightmarish dimension (who is to blame, the catastrophic scenario ahead) and that idealized imaginary quality (Lacan's object a) that the subject possesses and that underscores their own imagined sense of cultural superiority (their libidinal treasure). 

Moreover,  fantasy can be understood as the framework that arranges reality and how we engage it - a fact understood by Lacan and Fanon alike - and it is in this sense more real than reality. The notion of fantasy helps us understand how race is much more than socially constructed. Race as fantasy represents, by contrast, a series of profound - and often pathological - fantasmatic commitments to racial otherness as essential difference qualified by a series of stereotypical associations that seem virtually impossible to dislodge (Blackness as criminality, Black lives as not mattering, Whiteness as paradigmatic model of humanity, etc.)