While Johnny Mandel sang “suicide is painless,” it is apparently also ethical. Duquesne University Psychology professor Derek Hook is under fire this week after arguing in class that white people may find that the ethical option for the dismantling of white culture is suicide. As will likely come as little surprise to many on this blog, I oppose calls for Hook’s termination as a matter of academic freedom.
In a class to Baltimore-based American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work in June available on Twitter, Hook used a quote by South African philosophy professor, Terblanche Delport, that “White people should commit suicide as an ethical act.” Delport was discussing the movement for equality in South Africa. Delport stated:
“If the goal is to dismantle white supremacy, and white supremacy is white culture … then the goal has to be to dismantle white culture and ultimately white people themselves. The total integration into Africa by white people will also automatically then mean the death of white people as white as a concept would not exist anymore.”
Hook stated “there was something ethical in Delport’s statements” since, as Delport argued, “The only way then for white people to become part of Africa is to not exist as white people anymore.” Hook then added I want to suggest that psychoanalytically we could even make the argument that there was something ethical in Delport’s statements.” While noting that Delport wanted to stir up passions as a “fighter academic,” “nevertheless, I want to make the argument that there is some kind of ethical dimension to his, his provocations.”
Hook praised Delport taking “his White audience to the threshold of a type of symbolic extinction … he took them to a proposed end of whiteness” and “offered his White audience the opportunity to” contemplate “the castration of whiteness.”
The University has insisted that Hook did not endorse a call for white suicide and is being misrepresented in his use of the material.
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I don't believe academic freedom ought to be teaching or moralizing suicide as an option for our white children... maybe equal opportunity should kick in and suicide should be seen as a way out for anyone unable to accept everything the world has to offer as equivalent morality... Maybe single women who become pregnant should choose suicide if they become emotionally distressed. Professors at Universities are privileged to have the ear of our brightest youth and with that privelege comes responsibility and ACCOUNTABILITY.... a concept often very strange for a Liberal.
In this case, counseling suicide in a class that prepares future clinicians for work with troubled souls is akin to having a Doctor counseling murder as an alternative for the chronically ill... it would not be tolerated. Sorry, Dee... this professor needs to be fired and those who would take the same view told there are moral maxims, and counseling suicide as acceptable is one of those red lines that should not be crossed.