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.”